Every woman should hear this once in her life - Becoming by Michelle Obama

📘 Becoming by Michelle Obama
Who This Book Is For:
🌱 Young people seeking inspiration — shows how self-discovery shapes a powerful life.
👩🏽‍⚖️ Women balancing ambition and family — shares honest struggles behind the success.
🗣️ Anyone with a voice to find — encourages authenticity in a loud world.
📚 Readers craving real stories — offers depth, dignity, and transformation.
💫 People from underrepresented backgrounds — a mirror of hope, strength, and identity.

The State It Helps You Move From:
😔 Feeling unseen or unheard.
🌀 Confused about your place in the world.
🚧 Holding back your voice to fit expectations.

The State It Leads To:
🌿 Becoming yourself — even when the world resists it.
🗺️ Owning your journey — with its twists, flaws, and triumphs.
🔥 Finding your voice — and using it with impact.

🔍 Memorable Insight from the Book:
“Your story is what you have, what you will always have. It is something to own.”

⚠️ Important: This is not just a memoir. It’s a powerful map for anyone growing, healing, becoming.

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Book: Becoming
Author: Michelle Obama
Genre: Memoir
Topics: Race in America, Political Life
Keywords: First Lady memoir, speed reading, Black excellence, booktok
Hashtags: #SpeedReading #Becoming #MichelleObama

Becoming by Michelle Obama To all the who
people have helped me become: the folks who raised me Fraser, Marian, Craig, and my
vast extended family, my circle of strong women, who always me
lift up, my loyal and dedicated staff, who to make
continue me proud. To the loves of my life: Malia and Sasha, my two most precious peas, who are my for
reasons being, and finally, Barack, who always promised
me an interesting journey. PREFACE March 2017 When I was a kid, my aspirations were simple. I wanted a
dog. I wanted a house that had stairs in it
two floors for one family. I wanted, for some reason, a four-door of
station wagon instead the two-door Buick that was my father’s pride and joy. I used to tell
people that when I grew up, I was going to be a pediatrician. Why? Because I loved being around little
kids and I quickly learned that it was a pleasing answer for adults to hear. Oh, a doctor! What a good choice! In
those days, I wore pigtails and bossed my older and
brother around managed, always and no matter what, to get As at
school. I was ambitious, though I didn’t know I
exactly what was shooting for. Now I think it’s one of the most useless
questions an adult can ask a child What do you want to be when you grow up?
As if growing up is finite. As if at some point you become something
and that’s the end. So far in my life, I’ve been a lawyer. I’ve been a vice president at a hospital
and the director of a nonprofit that helps young people build meaningful careers. a
I’ve been working- class black student at a fancy mostly white college. I’ve been the only woman, the only African American, in all sorts
of rooms. I’ve been a bride, a stressed- out new
mother, a daughter torn up by grief. And until recently, I was the First Lady
of the United States of America a job that’s not officially a job, but that has
nonetheless given me a platform like nothing I could have imagined. It challenged me and
humbled me, lifted me up and shrank me down, sometimes all at once. I’m just beginning
to process what took place over these last years from the moment in 2006 when my husband
first started talking about running for president to the cold morning this winter when I into
climbed a limo with Melania Trump, accompanying her to her husband’s
inauguration. It’s been quite a ride. When you’re First
Lady, America shows itself to you in its
extremes. I’ve been to fund- raisers in private art
homes that look more like museums, houses where people own bathtubs made
from gemstones. I’ve visited families who lost everything
in Hurricane Katrina and were tearful and grateful just to have a working refrigerator and stove. I’ve encountered people I find to be and
shallow hypocritical and others teachers and military spouses and so many more whose spirits are so and
deep strong it’s astonishing. And I’ve met kids lots of them, all over the world who crack me up and me
fill with hope and who blessedly manage to forget about my title once we a
start rooting around in the dirt of garden. Since stepping reluctantly into
public life, I’ve been held up as the most powerful in
woman the world and taken down as an “angry black woman.” I’ve wanted to my
ask detractors which part of that phrase matters to them the most is it “angry” or “black” or “woman”? I’ve smiled for my
photos with people who call husband horrible names on national television, but still want a
framed keepsake for their mantel. I’ve heard about the swampy parts of the
internet that question everything about me, right down to whether I’m a woman or a
man. A sitting U.S. congressman has made fun
of my butt. I’ve been hurt. I’ve been furious. But mostly, I’ve tried to laugh this off.
stuff There’s a lot I still don’t know about
America, about life, about what the future might
bring. But I do know myself. My father, Fraser, taught me to work hard, laugh often, and keep my word. My mother, Marian, showed me how to think
for myself and to use my voice. Together, in our cramped apartment on the
South Side of Chicago, they helped me see the value in our story, in my story, in the larger story of our
country. Even when it’s not pretty or perfect. Even when it’s more real than you want it
to be. Your story is what you have, what you will always have. It is to own.
something For eight years, I lived in the White
House, a place with more stairs than I can count
plus elevators, a bowling alley, and an in-house florist. I slept in a bed that was made up with
Italian linens. Our meals were cooked by a team of world-
class chefs and delivered by professionals more highly trained than those at any or
five-star restaurant hotel. Secret Service agents, with their and and
earpieces guns deliberately flat expressions, stood outside our doors, doing their best
to stay out of our family’s private life. We got used to it, eventually, sort of the strange grandeur of our new
home and also the constant, quiet presence of others. The White House
is where our two girls played ball in the hallways and climbed trees on the South
Lawn. It’s where Barack sat up late at night, poring over briefings and drafts of in
speeches the Treaty Room, and where Sunny, one of our dogs, sometimes pooped on the rug. I could on
stand the Truman Balcony and watch the tourists posing with their selfie sticks and the
peering through iron fence, trying to guess at what went on inside. There were days when I felt suffocated by
the fact that our windows had to be kept shut for security, that I couldn’t a
get some fresh air without causing fuss. There were other times when I’d be by the
awestruck white magnolias blooming outside, the everyday bustle of government
business, the majesty of a military welcome. There were days, weeks, and months when I
hated politics. And there were moments when the beauty of
this country and its people so overwhelmed me that I couldn’t speak. Then it was over. Even if you see it coming, even as your final weeks are filled with
emotional good-byes, the day itself is still a blur. A hand goes on a Bible; an oath gets
repeated. One president’s furniture gets carried
out while another’s comes in. Closets are emptied and refilled in the a
span of few hours. Just like that, there are new heads on
new pillows new temperaments, new dreams. And when it ends, when you walk out the door that last time
from the world’s most famous address, you’re left in many ways to find yourself
again. So let me start here, with a small thing
that happened not long ago. I was at home in the redbrick house that
my family recently moved into. Our new house sits about two miles from
our old house, on a quiet neighborhood street. We’re in.
still settling In the family room, our furniture is the
arranged same way it was in the White House. We’ve got mementos around the that
house remind us it was all real photos of our family time at Camp David, handmade pots given to me by Native
American students, a book signed by Nelson Mandela. What was strange about this night was was
that everyone gone. Barack was traveling. Sasha was out with
friends. Malia’s been living and working in New
York, finishing out her gap year before college. It was just me, our two dogs, and a silent, empty house like I haven’t
known in eight years. And I was hungry. I walked down the from
stairs our bedroom with the dogs following on my heels. In the kitchen, I opened the fridge. I found a loaf of
bread, took out two pieces, and laid them in the
toaster oven. I opened a cabinet and got out a plate. I know it’s a weird thing to say, but to take a plate from a shelf in the
kitchen without anyone first insisting that they get it for me, to stand by myself in
watching bread turn brown the toaster, feels as close to a return to my old life
as I’ve come. Or maybe it’s my new life just beginning
to announce itself. In the end, I didn’t just make toast; I
made cheese toast, moving my slices of bread to the and a of
microwave melting fat mess gooey cheddar between them. I then carried my plate to
outside the backyard. I didn’t have to tell anyone I was going. I just went. I was in bare feet, wearing a pair of shorts. The chill of
winter had finally lifted. The crocuses were just starting to push
up through the beds along our back wall. The air smelled like spring. I sat on the
steps of our veranda, feeling the warmth of the day’s sun still
caught in the slate beneath my feet. A dog started barking somewhere in the
distance, and my own dogs paused to listen, seeming momentarily confused. It occurred
to me that it was a jarring sound for them, given that we didn’t have neighbors, let alone neighbor dogs, at the White
House. For them, all this was new. As the dogs loped off to explore the of
perimeter the yard, I ate my toast in the dark, feeling alone in the best possible way. My mind wasn’t on the group of guards a
with guns sitting less than hundred yards away at the custom- built command post
inside our garage, or the fact that I still can’t walk down
a street without a security detail. I wasn’t thinking about the new president
or for that matter the old president, either. I was thinking instead about how
in a few minutes I would go back inside my house, wash my plate in the sink, and head up to bed, maybe opening a so I
window could feel the spring air how glorious that would be. I was
thinking, too, that the stillness was affording me
a first real opportunity to reflect. As First Lady, I’d get to the end of a to
busy week and need be reminded how it had started. But time is
beginning to feel different. My girls, who arrived at the White House
with their Polly Pockets, a blanket named Blankie, and a stuffed
tiger named Tiger, are now teenagers, young women with plans
and voices of their own. My husband is making his own adjustments
to life after the White House, catching his own breath. And here I am, in this new place, with a lot I want to
say. Michelle’s South Side roots shape her in
Becoming Me. PART 1 Becoming Me If you’ve read this far, you’re already –
improving your skill! Support the channel subscribe, leave a like, or drop a comment. Together, read
we’ll even faster! South Side Chicago childhood, video book, memoir speed reading. CHAPTER 1 Michelle’s humble beginnings unfold in
this speed reading memoir. I spent much of my childhood listening to
the sound of striving. It came in the form of bad music, or at least amateur music, coming up the
through floorboards of my bedroom the plink plink plink of students sitting downstairs at
my great-aunt Robbie’s piano, slowly and imperfectly learning their
scales. My family lived in the South Shore of
neighborhood Chicago, in a tidy brick bungalow that belonged to
Robbie and her husband, Terry. My parents rented an apartment on
the second floor, while Robbie and Terry lived on the first. Robbie was my mother’s aunt and had been
generous to her over many years, but to me she was kind of a terror. Prim and serious, she directed the choir
at a local church and was also our community’s resident piano teacher. She wore sensible
heels and kept a pair of reading glasses on a chain around her neck. She had a sly but
smile didn’t appreciate sarcasm the way my mother did. I’d sometimes hear her out or
chewing her students for not having practiced enough chewing out their parents for delivering
them late to lessons. “Good night!” she’d exclaim in the middle
of the day, with the same blast of exasperation else
someone might say, “Oh, for God’s sake!” Few, it seemed, could live up to Robbie’s standards. The sound of people trying, however, became the soundtrack to our life. There was plinking in the afternoons, plinking in the evenings. Ladies from to
church sometimes came over practice hymns, belting their piety through our walls. Under Robbie’s rules, kids who took piano
lessons were allowed to work on only one song at a time. From my room, I’d listen to them attempting, note by
uncertain note, to win her approval, graduating from “Hot
Cross Buns” to “Brahms’s Lullaby,” but only after
many tries. The music was never annoying; it was just
persistent. It crept up the stairwell that separated
our space from Robbie’s. It drifted through open windows in
summertime, accompanying my thoughts as I played with
my Barbies or built little kingdoms made out of blocks. The only respite came when my got
father home from an early shift at the city’s water treatment plant and put the
Cubs game on TV, boosting the volume just enough to blot
it all out. This was the tail end of the 1960s on the
South Side of Chicago. The Cubs weren’t bad, but they weren’t
great, either. I’d sit on my dad’s lap in his to
recliner and listen him narrate how the Cubs were in the middle of a late- or
season swoon why Billy Williams, who lived just around the corner from us
on Constance Avenue, had such a sweet swing from the left side
of the plate. Outside the ballparks, America was in the
midst of a massive and uncertain shift. The Kennedys were dead. Martin Luther Jr.
King had been killed standing on a balcony in
Memphis, setting off riots across the country, including in Chicago. The 1968 Democratic
National Convention turned bloody as police went after Vietnam War protesters with batons and tear gas in
Grant Park, about nine miles north of where we lived. White families, meanwhile, were moving of
out the city in droves, lured by the suburbs the promise of
better schools, more space, and probably more whiteness, too. None of this really registered with
me. I was just a kid, a girl with Barbies and
blocks, with two parents and an older brother who
slept each night with his head about three feet from mine. My family was my world, the center of everything. My mother me to
taught how read early, walking me to the public library, sitting with me as I sounded out words on
a page. My father went to work every day dressed
in the blue uniform of a city laborer, but at night he showed us what it meant
to love jazz and art. As a boy, he’d taken classes at the Art
Institute of Chicago, and in high school he’d painted and
sculpted. He’d been a competitive swimmer and boxer
in school, too, and as an adult was a fan of every
televised sport, from professional golf to the NHL. He appreciated seeing strong people excel. When my brother, Craig, got interested in
basketball, my father propped coins above the in our
doorframe kitchen, encouraging him to leap for them. Everything that mattered was within a my
five-block radius grandparents and cousins, the church on the corner where we were at
not quite regulars Sunday school, the gas station where my mother sometimes
sent me to pick up a pack of Newports, and the liquor store, which also sold
Wonder bread, penny candy, and gallons of milk. On hot summer nights, Craig and I dozed
off to the sound of cheers from the adult- league softball games going on at
the nearby public park, where by day we climbed on the playground
jungle gym and played tag with other kids. Craig and I are not quite two years apart
in age. He’s got my father’s soft eyes and
optimistic spirit, my mother’s implacability. The two of us
have always been tight, in part thanks to an unwavering and he to
somewhat inexplicable allegiance seemed feel for his baby sister right from the start. There’s an early family photograph, a and
black white of the four of us sitting on a couch, my mother smiling as she holds
me on her lap, my father appearing serious and proud on
with Craig perched his. We’re dressed for church or maybe a
wedding. I’m about eight months old, a pudge-
faced, no- nonsense bruiser in diapers and an
ironed white dress, looking ready to slide out of my mother’s
clutches, staring down the camera as if I might eat
it. Next to me is Craig, gentlemanly in a bow
little tie and suit jacket, bearing an earnest expression. He’s two
years old and already the portrait of brotherly vigilance and responsibility his arm extended toward
mine, his fingers wrapped protectively around
my fat wrist. At the time the photo was taken, we were living across the hall from my in
father’s parents Parkway Gardens, an affordable housing project on the Side
South made up of modernist apartment buildings. It had been built in the 1950s and was as
designed a co-op, meant to ease a post–World War II housing
shortage for black working- class families. Later, it would deteriorate under the of
grind poverty and gang violence, becoming one of the city’s more dangerous
places to live. Long before this, though, when I was a
still toddler, my parents who had met as teenagers and
married in their mid- twenties accepted an offer to move a few miles south to Robbie and a
Terry’s place in nicer neighborhood. On Euclid Avenue, we were two households
living under one not very big roof. Judging from the layout, the second- had
floor space probably been designed as an in-law apartment meant for one or two people, but four of us found a way to fit inside. My parents slept in the lone bedroom, while Craig and I shared a bigger area I
that assume was intended to be the living room. Later, as we grew, my grandfather Purnell Shields, my
mother’s father, who was an enthusiastic if not deeply and
skilled carpenter brought over some cheap wooden paneling built a makeshift partition to divide the
room into two semiprivate spaces. He added a plastic accordion door to each
space and created a little common play area in front where we could keep our toys and
books. I loved my room. It was just big enough a
for twin bed and a narrow desk. I kept all my stuffed animals on
the bed, painstakingly tucking them around my head
each night as a form of ritual comfort. On his side of the wall, Craig lived a sort of mirror existence up
with his own bed pushed against the paneling, parallel to mine. The partition between
us was so flimsy that we could talk as we lay in bed at night, often tossing a sock
balled back and forth through the ten-inch gap between the partition and the ceiling
as we did. Aunt Robbie, meanwhile, kept her part of
the house like a mausoleum, the furniture swathed in protective that
plastic felt cold and sticky on my bare legs when I dared sit on it. Her shelves were with
loaded porcelain figurines we weren’t allowed to touch. I’d let my hand hover over a set a
of sweet- faced glass poodles delicate- looking mother and three tiny puppies and
then pull it back, fearing Robbie’s wrath. When lessons
weren’t happening, the first floor was deadly silent. The television was never on, the radio
never played. I’m not even sure the two of them talked
much down there. Robbie’s husband’s full name was William
Victor Terry, but for some reason we called him only by
his last name. Terry was like a shadow, a distinguished-
looking man who wore three- piece suits every day of the week and pretty much never said a
word. I came to think of upstairs and as two
downstairs different universes, ruled over by competing sensibilities.
Upstairs, we were noisy and unapologetically so. Craig and I threw balls and chased each
other around the apartment. We sprayed Pledge furniture polish on the
wood floor of the hallway so we could slide farther and faster in our socks, often crashing into the walls. We held in
brother- sister boxing matches the kitchen, using the two sets of gloves my dad had
given us for Christmas, along with personalized instructions on a
how to land proper jab. At night, as a family, we played board
games, told stories and jokes, and cranked 5 on
Jackson records the stereo. When it got to be too much for Robbie
down below, she’d emphatically flick the light switch
in our shared stairwell, which also controlled the lightbulb in
our upstairs hallway, off and on, again and again her way of us
polite-ish telling to pipe down. Robbie and Terry were older. They grew up
in a different era, with different concerns. They’d seen our
things parents hadn’t things that Craig and I, in our raucous childishness, couldn’t to
begin guess. This was some version of what my mother
would say if we got too wound up about the grouchiness downstairs. Even if
we didn’t know the context, we were instructed to remember that
context existed. Everyone on earth, they’d tell us, was carrying around an unseen history, and that alone deserved some tolerance. Robbie, I’d learn many years later, had sued Northwestern University for
discrimination, having registered for a choral music in a
workshop there 1943 and been denied room in the women’s dorm. She was instructed to a
stay instead in rooming house in town a place “for coloreds,” she was told. Terry, meanwhile, had once been a Pullman
porter on one of the overnight passenger rail lines running in and out of Chicago. It was a respectable if not well- paying
profession, made up entirely of black men who kept
their uniforms immaculate while also hauling luggage, serving meals, and generally tending to
the needs of train passengers, including shining their shoes. Years his
after retirement, Terry still lived in a state of numbed
formality impeccably dressed, remotely servile, never asserting himself
in any way, at least that I would see. It was as if he’d surrendered a part of a
himself as way of coping. I’d watch him mow our lawn in the high of
heat summer in a pair of wing tips, suspenders, and a thin-
brimmed fedora, the sleeves of his dress shirt carefully
rolled up. He’d indulge himself by having exactly a
one cigarette day and exactly one cocktail a month, and even then he wouldn’t loosen up the
way my father and mother would after having a highball or a Schlitz, which they did a
few times a month. Some part of me wanted Terry to talk, to spill whatever secrets he carried. I imagined that he had all sorts of about
interesting stories cities he’d visited and how rich people on trains behaved or maybe
didn’t. But we wouldn’t hear any of it. For some reason, he’d never tell. *** I was about four when I decided I to
wanted learn piano. Craig, who was in the first grade, was already making trips downstairs for
weekly lessons on Robbie’s upright and returning relatively unscathed. I figured I was ready. I was pretty I had
convinced already learned piano, in fact, through straight- up osmosis all
those hours spent listening to other kids fumbling through their songs. The music was already in my
head. I just wanted to go downstairs and to my
demonstrate exacting great-aunt what a gifted girl I was, how it would take no effort at all
for me to become her star student. Robbie’s piano sat in a small at
square room the rear of the house, close to a window that overlooked the
backyard. She kept a potted plant in one corner and
a folding table where students could fill out music work sheets in the other. During lessons, she sat straight spined
in an upholstered high-back armchair, tapping out the beat with one finger, her head cocked as she listened keenly
for each mistake. Was I afraid of Robbie? Not exactly, but there was a scariness to her; she a I
represented rigid kind of authority hadn’t yet encountered elsewhere. She demanded
excellence from every kid who sat on her piano bench. I saw her as someone to win over, or maybe to somehow conquer. With her, it always felt like there was something
to prove. At my first lesson, my legs dangled from
the piano bench, too short to reach the floor. Robbie gave me my own elementary music
workbook, which I was thrilled about, and showed me
how to position my hands properly over the keys. “All right, pay attention,” she
said, scolding me before we’d even begun. “Find middle C.” When you’re little, a piano can look like it has a thousand
keys. You’re staring at an expanse of black and
white that stretches farther than two small arms can reach. Middle C, I soon learned, was the anchoring point. It was the line
territorial between where the right hand and the left hand traveled, between the treble
and the bass clefs. If you could lay your thumb on middle C, everything else automatically fell into
place. The keys on Robbie’s piano had a subtle
unevenness of color and shape, places where bits of the ivory had broken
off over time, leaving them looking like a set of bad
teeth. Helpfully, the middle C key had a full
corner missing, a wedge about the size of my fingernail, which got me centered every time. It turned out I liked the piano. Sitting at it felt natural, like I was to
something meant do. My family was loaded with musicians and
music lovers, especially on my mother’s side. I had an
uncle who played in a professional band. Several of my aunts sang in church choirs. I had Robbie, who in addition to her and
choir lessons directed something called the Operetta Workshop, a shoestring musical theater
program for kids, which Craig and I attended every Saturday
morning in the basement of her church. The musical center of my family, though, was my grandfather Shields, the
carpenter, who was also Robbie’s younger brother. He was a carefree, round- bellied man an
with infectious laugh and a scraggly salt- and- pepper beard. When I was younger, he’d lived on the West Side of the city I
and Craig and had referred to him as Westside. But he moved into our I
neighborhood the same year started taking piano lessons, and we’d duly rechristened him
Southside. Southside had separated from my decades
grandmother earlier, when my mother was in her teens. He lived with my aunt Carolyn, my mom’s oldest sister, and my uncle
Steve, her youngest brother, just two blocks us
from in a cozy one-story house that he’d wired top to bottom for music, putting speakers
in every room, including the bathroom. In the dining
room, he built an elaborate cabinet system to
hold his stereo equipment, much of it scavenged at yard sales. He had two mismatched turntables plus a
rickety old reel- to- reel tape player and shelves packed with records he’d collected over
many years. There was a lot about the world that
Southside didn’t trust. He was kind of a classic old-guy
conspiracy theorist. He didn’t trust dentists, which led to no
his having virtually teeth. He didn’t trust the police, and he didn’t
always trust white people, either, being the grandson of a Georgia
slave and having spent his early childhood in Alabama during the time of Jim Crow before coming
north to Chicago in the 1920s. When he had kids of his own, Southside had taken pains to keep them
safe scaring them with real and imagined stories about what might happen to black kids who into
crossed the wrong neighborhood, lecturing them about avoiding the police. Music seemed to be an antidote to his
worries, a way to relax and crowd them out. When Southside had a payday for his work,
carpentry he’d sometimes splurge and buy himself a
new album. He threw regular parties for the family, forcing everyone to talk loudly over he
whatever put on the stereo, because the music always dominated. We at
celebrated most major life events Southside’s house, which meant that over the years we to and
unwrapped Christmas presents Ella Fitzgerald blew out birthday candles to Coltrane. According
to my mother, as a younger man Southside had made a of
point pumping jazz into his seven children, often waking everyone at sunrise by one
playing of his records at full blast. His love for music was infectious. Once Southside moved to our neighborhood, I’d pass whole afternoons at his house, pulling albums from the shelf at random
and putting them on his stereo, each one its own immersing adventure. Even though I was small, he put no on I
restrictions what could touch. He’d later buy me my first album, Stevie Wonder’s Talking Book, which I’d a
keep at his house on special shelf he designated for my favorite records. If I was hungry, he’d make me a milk shake or fry us a we
whole chicken while listened to Aretha or Miles or Billie. To me, Southside was as big as heaven. And heaven, as I envisioned it, had to be a place full of jazz. *** At home, I continued to work on my as
own progress a musician. Sitting at Robbie’s upright piano, I was
quick to pick up the scales that osmosis thing was real and I threw myself into filling
out the sight- reading work sheets she gave me. Because we didn’t have a piano of our
own, I had to do my practicing downstairs on
hers, waiting until nobody else was having a
lesson, often dragging my mom with me to sit in
the upholstered chair and listen to me play. I learned one song in the piano and
book then another. I was probably no better than her other
students, no less fumbling, but I was driven. To me, there was magic in the learning. I got a buzzy sort of satisfaction from
it. For one thing, I’d picked up on the
simple, encouraging correlation between how long
I practiced and how much I achieved. And I sensed something in Robbie as well
too deeply buried to be outright pleasure, but still, a pulse of something lighter I
and happier coming from her when made it through a song without messing up, when my right hand picked out a melody my
while left touched down on a chord. I’d notice it out of the corner of my
eye: Robbie’s lips would unpurse themselves just slightly; her tapping finger would pick a
up little bounce. This, it turns out, was our honeymoon
phase. It’s possible that we might have this
continued way, Robbie and I, had I been less curious and
more reverent when it came to her piano method. But the lesson book was and
thick enough my progress on the opening few songs slow enough that I got impatient a
and started peeking ahead and not just few pages ahead but deep into the book, checking out the titles of the more songs
advanced and beginning, during my practice sessions, to fiddle
around with playing them. When I proudly debuted one of my late-
in- the- book songs for Robbie, she exploded, slapping down my with a
achievement vicious “Good night!” I got chewed out the way I’d heard her of
chewing out plenty students before me. All I’d done was try to learn more and
faster, but Robbie viewed it as a crime treason.
approaching She wasn’t impressed, not even a little
bit. Nor was I chastened. I was the kind of to
kid who liked concrete answers my questions, who liked to reason things out
to some logical if exhausting end. I was lawyerly and also veered toward
dictatorial, as my brother, who often got ordered out
of our shared play area, would attest. When I thought I had a good
idea about something, I didn’t like being told no. Which is how my great-aunt and I ended up
in each other’s faces, both of us hot and unyielding. “How could you be mad at me for wanting a
to learn new song?” “You’re not ready for it. That’s not how
you learn piano.” “But I am ready. I just played it.” “That’s not how it’s done.” “But why?” Piano lessons became epic and trying, largely due to my refusal to follow the
prescribed method and Robbie’s refusal to see anything good in my freewheeling approach to her
songbook. We went back and forth, week after week, as I remember it. I was stubborn and so
was she. I had a point of view and she did, too. In between disputes, I continued to
play the piano and she continued to listen, offering a stream of corrections. I gave
her little credit for my improvement as a player. She gave me little credit for improving. But still, the lessons went on. Upstairs, my parents and Craig found it
all so very funny. They cracked up at the dinner table as I
recounted my battles with Robbie, still seething as I ate my spaghetti and
meatballs. Craig, for his part, had no issues with
Robbie, being a cheerful kid and a by- the- book, marginally invested piano student. My no
parents expressed sympathy for my woes and none for Robbie’s, either. In general, they weren’t ones to
intervene in matters outside schooling, expecting early on that my brother and I
should handle our own business. They seemed to view their job as mostly
to listen and bolster us as needed inside the four walls of our home. And where another parent might have a kid
scolded for being sassy with an elder as I had been, they also let that be. My mother had lived with Robbie on and
off since she was about sixteen, following every arcane rule the woman
laid down, and it’s possible she was secretly happy
to see Robbie’s authority challenged. Looking back on it now, I think my my and
parents appreciated feistiness I’m glad for it. It was a flame inside me they wanted
to keep lit. *** Once a year, Robbie held a fancy so
recital that her students could perform for a live audience. To this day, I’m not sure how she managed it, but she somehow got access to a practice
hall at Roosevelt University in downtown Chicago, holding her recitals in a grand stone on
building Michigan Avenue, right near where the Chicago Symphony
Orchestra played. Just thinking about going there made me
nervous. Our apartment on Euclid Avenue was about
nine miles south of the Chicago Loop, which with its glittering skyscrapers and
crowded sidewalks felt otherworldly to me. My family made trips into the heart of a
the city only handful of times a year, to visit the Art Institute or see a
play, the four of us traveling like astronauts
in the capsule of my dad’s Buick. My father loved any excuse to drive. He was devoted to his car, a bronze- colored two-door Buick Electra
225, which he referred to with pride as “the a
Deuce and Quarter.” He kept it buffed and waxed and was about
religious the maintenance schedule, taking it to Sears for tire rotations and
oil changes the same way my mom carted us kids to the pediatrician for checkups. We loved the Deuce and a Quarter, too. It had smooth lines and narrow that
taillights made it look cool and futuristic. It was roomy enough to feel like a house. I could practically stand up inside it, running my hands over the cloth- covered
ceiling. This was back when wearing a seat belt
was optional, so most of the time Craig and I just in
flopped around the rear, draping our bodies over the front seat we
when wanted to talk to our parents. Half the time I’d pull myself up on the
headrest and jut my chin forward so that my face could be next to my dad’s
and we’d have the exact same view. The car provided another form of for my
closeness family, a chance to talk and travel at once. In the evenings after dinner, Craig and I
would sometimes beg my dad to take us out for an aimless drive. As a treat on
summer nights, we’d head to a drive-in theater southwest
of our neighborhood to watch Planet of the Apes movies, parking the Buick at dusk and in
settling for the show, my mother handing out a dinner of fried
chicken and potato chips she’d brought from home, Craig and I eating it on our laps in the
backseat, careful to wipe our hands on our napkins
and not the seat. It would be years before I fully what the
understood driving car meant to my father. As a kid, I could only sense it the he
liberation felt behind the wheel, the pleasure he took in having a smooth-
running engine and perfectly balanced tires humming beneath him. He’d been in his thirties when a him
doctor informed that the odd weakness he’d started to feel in one leg was just the a
beginning of long and probably painful slide toward immobility, that odds were
that someday, due to a mysterious unsheathing of in his
neurons brain and spinal cord, he’d find himself unable to walk at all. I don’t have the precise dates, but it seems that the Buick came into my
father’s life at roughly the same time that multiple sclerosis did. And though
he never said it, the car had to provide some sort of
sideways relief. The diagnosis was not something he or my
mother dwelled upon. We were decades, still, from a time when
a simple Google search would bring up a head- spinning array of charts,
statistics, and medical explainers that either gave
or took away hope. I doubt he would have wanted to see them
anyway. Although my father was raised in the
church, he wouldn’t have prayed for God to spare
him. He wouldn’t have looked for alternative a
treatments or guru or some faulty gene to blame. In my family, we have a long- standing of
habit blocking out bad news, of trying to forget about it almost the
moment it arrives. Nobody knew how long my father had been
feeling poorly before he first took himself to the doctor, but my guess is it had been
already months if not years. He didn’t like medical appointments. He
wasn’t interested in complaining. He was the sort of person who accepted
what came and just kept moving forward. I do know that on the day of my big piano
recital, he was already walking with a slight limp, his left foot unable to catch up to his
right. All my memories of my father include some
manifestation of his disability, even if none of us were quite willing to
call it that yet. What I knew at the time was that my dad a
moved bit more slowly than other dads. I sometimes saw him pausing a
before walking up flight of stairs, as if needing to think through the before
maneuver actually attempting it. When we went shopping at the mall, he’d park himself on a bench, content to watch the bags or sneak in a
nap while the rest of the family roamed freely. Riding downtown for the
piano recital, I sat in the backseat of the Buick a nice
wearing dress and patent leather shoes, my hair in pigtails, experiencing the of
first cold sweat my life. I was anxious about performing, even back
though at home in Robbie’s apartment I’d practiced my song practically to death. Craig, too, was in a suit and prepared to play his
own song. But the prospect of it wasn’t bothering
him. He was sound asleep, in fact, knocked out cold in the backseat, his mouth agape, his expression blissful
and unworried. This was Craig. I’d spend a lifetime him
admiring for his ease. He was playing by then in a Biddy league
Basketball that had games every weekend and apparently had already tamed his nerves
around performing. My father would often pick a lot as close
to our destination as possible, shelling out more money for parking to to
minimize how far he’d have walk on his unsteady legs. That day, we found with no
Roosevelt University trouble and made our way up to what seemed like an enormous, echoing hall where the recital would take
place. I felt tiny inside it. The room had to-
elegant floor- ceiling windows through which you could see the wide lawns of Grant Park
and, beyond that, the white- capped swells of
Lake Michigan. There were steel-gray chairs arranged in
orderly rows, slowly filling with nervous kids and
expectant parents. And at the front, on a raised stage, were the first two baby grand pianos I’d
ever laid eyes on, their giant hardwood tops propped open
like black bird wings. Robbie was there, too, bustling about in
a floral- print dress like the belle of the ball albeit a matronly belle making sure
all her students had arrived with sheet music in hand. She shushed the room to silence it
when was time for the show to begin. I don’t recall who played in what order
that day. I only know that when it was my turn, I got up from my seat and walked with my
very best posture to the front of the room, mounting the stairs and my
finding seat at one of the gleaming baby grands. The truth is I was ready. As much as I found Robbie to be snippy
and inflexible, I’d also internalized her devotion to
rigor. I knew my song so well I hardly had to
think about it. I just had to start moving my hands. And yet there was a problem, one I discovered in the split second it
took to lift my little fingers to the keys. I was sitting at a perfect piano, it turned out, with its surfaces dusted,
carefully its internal wires precisely tuned, its a
eighty- eight keys laid out in flawless ribbon of black and white. The issue was that I to
wasn’t used flawless. In fact, I’d never once in my life it.
encountered My experience of the piano came entirely
from Robbie’s squat little music room with its scraggly potted plant and view of our modest
backyard. The only instrument I’d ever played was
her less- than- perfect upright, with its honky-tonk patchwork of yellowed
keys and its conveniently chipped middle C. To me, that’s what a piano was the same
way my neighborhood was my neighborhood, my dad was my dad, my life was my life. It was all I knew. Now, suddenly, I was aware of people watching
me from their chairs as I stared hard at the high gloss of the piano keys, finding nothing there but sameness. I had
no clue where to place my hands. With a tight throat and chugging heart, I looked out to the audience, trying not to telegraph my panic, searching for the safe harbor of my face.
mother’s Instead, I spotted a figure rising from
the front row and slowly levitating in my direction. It was Robbie. We had brawled plenty by
then, to the point where I viewed her a little
bit like an enemy. But here in my moment of comeuppance, she arrived at my shoulder almost like an
angel. Maybe she understood my shock. Maybe she
knew that the disparities of the world had just quietly shown themselves to me for the
first time. It’s possible she needed simply to hurry
things up. Either way, without a word, Robbie gently
laid one finger on middle C so that I would know where to start. Then, turning back with the smallest smile of
encouragement, she left me to play my song. CHAPTER 2 I started kindergarten at Bryn Mawr in of
Elementary School the fall 1969, showing up with the twin advantages of in
knowing advance how to read basic words and having a well-liked second- grade brother
ahead of me. The school, a four-story brick building a
with yard in front, sat just a couple of blocks from our on
house Euclid. Getting there involved a two-minute walk
or, if you did it like Craig, a one-minute run. I liked school right
away. I liked my teacher, a diminutive white
lady named Mrs. Burroughs, who seemed ancient to me but
was probably in her fifties. Her classroom had big sunny windows, a collection of baby dolls to play with, and a giant cardboard playhouse in the
back. I made friends in my class, drawn to the kids who, like me, seemed eager to be there. I was confident
in my ability to read. At home, I’d plowed through the Dick and
Jane books, courtesy of my mom’s library card, and thus was thrilled to hear that our as
first job kindergartners would be learning to read new sets of words by sight. We were assigned a list of colors to
study, not the hues, but the words themselves
“red,” “blue,” “green,” “black,” “orange,”
“purple,” “white.” In class, Mrs. Burroughs quizzed us one a
student at time, holding up a series of large manila cards
and asking us to read whatever word was printed in black letters on the front. I watched one day as the girls and boys I
was just getting to know stood up and worked through the color cards, succeeding and failing in varying degrees, and were told to sit back down at point
whatever they got stumped. It was meant to be something of a game, I think, the way a spelling bee is a game, but you could see a subtle sorting going
on and a knowing slump of humiliation in the kids who didn’t make it past “red.” This, of course, was 1969, in a public on
school the South Side of Chicago. Nobody was talking about self- esteem or
growth mind-sets. If you’d had a head start at home, you were rewarded for it at school, deemed “bright” or “gifted,” which in
turn only compounded your confidence. The advantages aggregated quickly. The in
two smartest kids my kindergarten class were Teddy, a Korean American boy, and Chiaka, an African American girl, who both would
remain at the top of the class for years to come. I was driven to keep up with
them. When it came my turn to read the words
off the teacher’s manila cards, I stood up and gave it everything I had, rattling off “red,” “green,” and “blue” without effort. “Purple” took a second, though, and “orange” was hard. But it the
wasn’t until letters W-H-I-T-E came up that I froze altogether, my throat instantly dry, my mouth awkward and unable to shape the
sound as my brain glitched madly, trying to dig up a color that resembled
“wuh-haaa.” It was a straight- up choke. I felt a weird airiness in my knees, as if they might buckle. But before they
did, Mrs. Burroughs instructed me to sit back
down. And that’s exactly when the word hit me
in its full and easy perfection. White. Whiiiite. The word was “white.” Lying in bed that night with my stuffed
animals packed around my head, I thought only of “white.” I spelled it
in my head, forward and backward, chastising myself
for my own stupidity. The embarrassment felt like a weight, like something I’d never shake off, even though I knew my parents wouldn’t
care whether I’d read every card correctly. I just wanted to achieve. Or maybe I want
didn’t to be dismissed as incapable of achieving. I was sure my teacher had now
pegged me as someone who couldn’t read or, worse, didn’t try. I obsessed over the
dime-sized gold-foil stars that Mrs. Burroughs had given to Teddy and Chiaka
that day to wear on their chests as an emblem of their accomplishment, or maybe
a sign that they were marked for greatness when the rest of us weren’t. The two of them, after all, had read every last color card
without a hitch. The next morning in class, I asked for a
do-over. When Mrs. Burroughs said no, cheerily we
adding that kindergartners had other things to get to, I demanded it. Pity the kids who then had
to watch me face the color cards a second time, going slower now, pausing deliberately to breathe after I’d
pronounced each word, refusing to let my nerves short- circuit
my brain. And it worked, through “black,” “orange,” “purple,” and especially “white.” I was
practically shouting the word “white” before I’d even seen the letters on the
card. I like to imagine now that Mrs. Burroughs was impressed with this little
black girl who’d found the courage to advocate for herself. I didn’t know whether Teddy and Chiaka
had even noticed. I was quick to claim my trophy, though, heading home that afternoon with
my head up and one of those gold-foil stars stuck on my shirt. *** At home, I lived in a world of high drama and
intrigue, immersing myself in an ever- evolving of
soap opera dolls. There were births, feuds, and betrayals. There was hope, hatred, and sometimes sex. My preferred way to pass the time between
school and dinner was to park myself in the common area outside my room and and
Craig’s spread my Barbies across the floor, spinning out scenarios that felt as real
to me as life itself, sometimes inserting Craig’s G.I. Joe into
action figures the plotlines. I kept my dolls’ outfits in a child- in a
sized vinyl suitcase covered floral print. I assigned every Barbie and every G.I. Joe a personality. I also recruited into
service the worn-out alphabet blocks my mother had used years earlier to teach us our letters. They, too, were given names and inner
lives. I rarely chose to join the neighborhood
kids who played outside after school, nor did I invite school friends home with
me, in part because I was a fastidious kid my
and didn’t want anyone meddling with dolls. I’d been to other girls’ houses and seen
the horror- show scenarios Barbies whose hair had been hacked off or whose faces had been
crosshatched with Magic Marker. And one thing I was learning at school be
was that kid dynamics could messy. Whatever sweet scenes you might witness a
on playground, beneath them lay a tyranny of shifting
hierarchies and alliances. There were queen bees, bullies, and
followers. I wasn’t shy, but I also wasn’t sure I of
needed any that messiness in my life outside school. Instead, I sank my
energy into being the sole animating force in my little common- area universe. If Craig up
showed and had the audacity to move a single block, I’d start shrieking. I was also a
not above hitting him when necessary usually direct fist blow to the middle of his back. The point was that the dolls and blocks
needed me to give them life, and I dutifully gave it to them, imposing one personal crisis after
another. Like any good deity, I was there to see
them suffer and grow. Meanwhile, from my bedroom window, I most
could observe of the real-world happenings on our block of Euclid Avenue. In the late afternoons, I’d see Mr. Thompson, the tall African
American man who owned the three-unit building across the street, loading his big bass guitar into
the back of his Cadillac, setting off for a gig in one jazz club or
another. I’d watch the Mendozas, the Mexican next
family door, arriving home in their pickup loaded with
ladders after a long day of painting houses, greeted at the fence by their yapping
dogs. Our neighborhood was middle- class and
racially mixed. Kids found one another based not on the
color of their skin but on who was outside and ready to play. My friends a
included girl named Rachel, whose mother was white and had a British
accent; Susie, a curly- haired redhead; and the whenever
Mendozas’ granddaughter she was visiting. We were a motley mix of last names
Kansopant, Abuasef, Yacker, Robinson and were too to
young register that things around us were changing fast. In 1950, fifteen years before my parents
moved to South Shore, the neighborhood had been 96 percent
white. By the time I’d leave for college in 1981, it would be about 96 percent black. Craig and I were raised squarely in the
crosscurrents of that flux. The blocks surrounding us were home to
Jewish families, immigrant families, white and black
families, folks who were thriving and some who were
not. In general, people tended to their lawns
and kept track of their children. They wrote checks to Robbie so their kids
could learn piano. My family, in fact, was probably on the
poor side of the neighborhood spectrum. We were among the few people we knew who
didn’t own their own home, stuffed as we were into Robbie and second
Terry’s floor. South Shore hadn’t yet tilted the way had
other neighborhoods with the better-off people long departed for the suburbs, the neighborhood closing
businesses one by one, the blight setting in but the tilt was
clearly beginning. We were starting to feel the effects of
this transition, especially at school. My second- grade to
classroom turned out be a mayhem of unruly kids and flying erasers, which had not been in
the norm either my experience or Craig’s. All this seemed due to a teacher who out
couldn’t figure how to assert control who didn’t seem to like children, even. Beyond that, it wasn’t clear that anyone
was particularly bothered by the fact that the teacher was incompetent. The students used it as
an excuse to act out, and she seemed to think only the worst of
us. In her eyes, we were a class of “bad
kids,” though we had no guidance and no and had
structure been sentenced to a grim, underlit room in the basement of the
school. Every hour there felt hellish and long. I sat miserably at my desk, in my puke-green chair puke green being
the official color of the 1970s learning nothing and waiting for the midday lunch break, when I could go home and have a sandwich
and complain to my mom. When I got angry as a kid, I almost always funneled it through my
mother. As I fumed about my new teacher, she listened placidly, saying things like
“Oh, dear” and “Oh, really?” She never my
indulged outrage, but she took my frustration seriously. If my mother were somebody different, she might have done the polite thing and
said, “Just go and do your best.” But she knew the difference. She knew the
difference between whining and actual distress. Without telling me, she went over to the
school and began a weeks-long process of behind- the- scenes lobbying, which led to me and
a couple of other high- performing kids getting quietly pulled out of class, given a of
battery tests, and about a week later reinstalled into a
permanently bright and orderly third- grade class upstairs, governed by a smiling, no- nonsense who
teacher knew her stuff. It was a small but life- changing move. I didn’t stop to ask myself then what to
would happen all the kids who’d been left in the basement with the teacher who
couldn’t teach. Now that I’m an adult, I realize that at
kids know a very young age when they’re being devalued, when adults to
aren’t invested enough help them learn. Their anger over it can manifest itself
as unruliness. It’s hardly their fault. They aren’t “bad
kids.” They’re just trying to survive bad
circumstances. At the time, though, I was just happy to
have escaped. But I’d learn many years later that my
mother, who is by nature wry and quiet but also
generally the most forthright person in any room, made a point of seeking out the and
second- grade teacher telling her, as kindly as possible, that she had no be
business teaching and should working as a drugstore cashier instead. *** As time
went by, my mother started nudging me to go and in
outside engage with kids the neighborhood. She was hoping that I’d learn to glide my
socially the way brother had. Craig, as I’ve mentioned, had a way of
making hard things look easy. He was by then a growing sensation on the
basketball court, high- spirited and agile and quickly
growing tall. My father pushed him to seek out the he
toughest competition could find, which meant that he would later send town
Craig across on his own to play with the best kids in the city. But for now, he left him to wrangle the
neighborhood talent. Craig would take his ball and carry it to
across the street Rosenblum Park, passing the monkey bars and swing set I
where liked to play, and then cross an invisible line, disappearing through a veil of trees to
the far side of the park, where the basketball courts were. I of it
thought as an abyss over there, a mythic dark forest of drunks and thugs
and criminal goings-on, but Craig, once he started visiting that
side of the park, would set me straight, saying that really
nobody over there was all that bad. Basketball, for my brother, seemed to
unlock every frontier. It taught him how to approach strangers a
when he wanted to snag spot in a pickup game. He learned how to talk a of
friendly form smack, trash- talking his bigger, faster on the
opponents court. It helped, too, to debunk various myths
about who was who and what was what around the neighborhood, reinforcing the that a
possibility something had long been credo of my dad’s that most people were good people if you just
treated them well. Even the sketchy guys who hung out in of
front the corner liquor store lit up when they spotted Craig, calling his name
and high- fiving him as we passed by. “How do you even know them?” I’d ask, incredulous. “I don’t know. They just know me,” he’d say with a shrug. I was ten when I finally mellowed enough
to start venturing out myself, a decision driven in large part by
boredom. It was summer and school was out. Craig and I rode a bus to Lake Michigan a
every day to go to rec camp run by the city at a beachfront park, but we’d be back home by four, with many daylight hours still to fill. My dolls were becoming less interesting, and without air- conditioning our got hot
apartment unbearably in the late afternoons. And so I started tailing Craig around the
neighborhood, meeting the kids I didn’t already know
from school. Across the alley behind our house, there was a mini housing community called
Euclid Parkway, where about fifteen homes had been built
around a common green space. It was a kind of paradise, free from cars and full of kids playing
softball and jumping double Dutch or sitting on stoops, just hanging out. But before I my
could find way into the fold of girls my age who hung out at the Parkway, I faced a test. It came in the form of
DeeDee, a girl who went to a nearby Catholic
school. DeeDee was athletic and pretty, but she a
wore her face in pout and was always ready with an eye roll. She often sat on
her family’s stoop next to another, more popular girl named Deneen. Deneen
was always friendly, but DeeDee didn’t seem to like me. I don’t know why. Every time I went over
to Euclid Parkway, she’d make quiet, cutting remarks, as if
just by showing up I’d managed to ruin everyone’s day. As the summer went on, DeeDee’s comments only grew louder. My to
morale began sink. I understood that I had choices. I could continue on as the picked-on new
girl, I could give up on the Parkway and just
go back to my toys at home, or I could attempt to earn DeeDee’s
respect. And inside that last choice lay another I
one: could try to reason with DeeDee, to win her over with words or some other
form of kid diplomacy, or I could just shut her up. The next time DeeDee made one of her
remarks, I lunged for her, summoning everything my
dad had taught me about how to throw a punch. The two of us fell to the ground, fists flailing and legs thrashing, every
kid in Euclid Parkway instantly clustered in a tight knot around us, their hollers fueled by and
excitement grade school bloodlust. I can’t remember who finally pulled us
apart, whether it was Deneen or my brother or a
maybe parent who’d been called to the scene, but when it was done, some sort of silent baptism had taken
place. I was officially an accepted member of
the neighborhood tribe. DeeDee and I were unharmed, dirt stained
and panting and destined never to be close friends, but at least I’d earned her respect. *** My dad’s Buick continued to be our
shelter, our window to the world. We took it out
on Sundays and summer evenings, cruising for no reason but the fact that
we could. Sometimes we’d end up in a neighborhood
to the south, an area known as Pill Hill due to an of
apparently large number African American doctors living there. It was one of the prettier, more affluent parts of the South Side, where people kept two cars in the and had
driveway abundant beds of flowers blooming along their walkways. My father viewed rich a
people with shade of suspicion. He didn’t like people who were uppity and
had mixed feelings about home ownership in general. There was a short period when he and my a
mom considered buying home for sale not far from Robbie’s house, driving over
one day to inspect the place with a real estate agent, but ultimately deciding it.
against At the time, I’d been all for it. In my mind, I thought it would mean if my
something family could live in a place with more than one floor. But my father was innately cautious, aware of the trade-offs, understanding to
the need maintain some savings for a rainy day. “You never want to end up house poor,” he’d tell us, explaining how some people
handed over their savings and borrowed too much, ending up with a nice home but no freedom
at all. My parents talked to us like we were
adults. They didn’t lecture, but rather indulged
every question we asked, no matter how juvenile. They never a for
hurried discussion the sake of convenience. Our talks could go on for hours, often because Craig and I took every to
opportunity grill my parents about things we didn’t understand. When we were little, we’d ask, “Why do people go to the bathroom?” or “Why do you need a job?” and then blitz them with follow-ups. One of my early Socratic victories came a
from question driven by self- interest: “Why do we have to eat eggs for breakfast?” Which led to a discussion about the of
necessity protein, which led me to ask why peanut butter as
couldn’t count protein, which eventually, after more debate, led
to my mother revising her stance on eggs, which I had never liked to eat in the
first place. For the next nine years, knowing that I’d
earned it, I made myself a fat peanut butter and for
jelly sandwich breakfast each morning and consumed not a single egg. As we grew, we spoke more about drugs and sex and
life choices, about race and inequality and politics. My parents didn’t expect us to be saints. My father, I remember, made a point of be
saying that sex was and should fun. They also never sugarcoated what they to
took be the harder truths about life. Craig, for example, got a new bike one it
summer and rode east to Lake Michigan, to the paved pathway along Rainbow Beach, where you could feel the breeze off the
water. He’d been promptly picked up by a police
officer who accused him of stealing it, unwilling to accept that a young black a
boy would have come across new bike in an honest way. (The officer, an African
American man himself, ultimately got a brutal tongue- lashing
from my mother, who made him apologize to Craig.) What
had happened, my parents told us, was unjust but also
unfortunately common. The color of our skin made us vulnerable. It was a thing we’d always have to
navigate. My father’s habit of driving us through a
Pill Hill was bit of an aspirational exercise, I would guess, a chance to show us what a
good education could yield. My parents had spent almost their entire
lives living within a couple of square miles in Chicago, but they had no illusions that I
Craig and would do the same. Before they were married, both of them
had briefly attended community colleges, but each had abandoned the exercise long
before getting a degree. My mother had been studying to become a a
teacher but realized she’d rather work as secretary. My father had simply run out
of money to pay tuition, joining the Army instead. He’d had no one
in his family to talk him into returning to school, no model of what that sort of
life looked like. Instead, he served two years moving
between different military bases. If finishing college and becoming an had
artist been a dream for my father, he quickly redirected his hopes, using to
his wages help pay for his younger brother’s degree in architecture instead. Now in his late
thirties, my dad was focused on saving for us kids. Our family was never going to be house
poor, because we weren’t going to own a house. My father operated from a practical place, sensing that resources were limited and
maybe so, too, was time. When he wasn’t driving, he now used a cane to get around. Before I finished elementary school, that
cane would become a crutch and soon after that two crutches. Whatever was eroding inside my
father, withering his muscles and stripping his
nerves, he viewed it as his own private challenge, as something to silently withstand. As a
family, we sustained ourselves with humble
luxuries. When Craig and I got our report cards at
school, our parents celebrated by ordering in a
pizza from Italian Fiesta, our favorite place. During hot weather, we’d buy hand- packed ice cream a pint of
each chocolate, butter pecan, and black cherry and make
it last for days. Every year for the Air and Water Show, we packed a picnic and drove north along
Lake Michigan to the fenced-off peninsula where my father’s water filtration plant was
located. It was one of the few times a year when
employee families were allowed through the gates and onto a grassy lawn overlooking
the lake, where the view of fighter jets swooping
in formation over the water rivaled that of any penthouse on Lake Shore Drive. Each July, my dad would take a week off from his job
tending boilers at the plant, and we’d pile into the Buick with an aunt
and a couple of cousins, seven of us in that two-door for hours, taking the Skyway out of Chicago, skirting the south end of Lake Michigan, and driving until we landed in White
Cloud, Michigan, at a place called Dukes Happy
Holiday Resort. It had a game room, a vending machine of
that sold glass bottles pop, and most important to us, a big outdoor
swimming pool. We rented a cabin with a kitchenette and
passed our days jumping in and out of the water. My parents barbecued, smoked
cigarettes, and played cards with my aunt, but my father also took long breaks to us
join kids in the pool. He was handsome, my dad, with a mustache
that tipped down the sides of his lips like a scythe. His chest and arms were
thick and roped with muscle, testament to the athlete he’d once been. During those long afternoons in the pool, he paddled and laughed and tossed our the
small bodies into air, his diminished legs suddenly less of a
liability. *** Decline can be a hard thing to
measure, especially when you’re in the midst of it. Every September, when Craig and I showed
up back at Bryn Mawr Elementary, we’d find fewer white kids on the
playground. Some had transferred to a nearby Catholic
school, but many had left the neighborhood
altogether. At first it felt as if just the white
families were leaving, but then that changed, too. It soon that
seemed anyone who had the means to go was now going. Much of the time, the departures went unannounced and
unexplained. We’d see a “For Sale” sign in front of or
the Yacker family’s house a moving van in front of Teddy’s and know what was
coming. Perhaps the biggest blow to my mother her
came when friend Velma Stewart announced that she and her husband had put a down payment on
a house in a suburb called Park Forest. The Stewarts had two kids and the
lived down block on Euclid. Like us, they were apartment dwellers. Mrs. Stewart had a wicked sense of humor
and a big infectious laugh, which drew my mother to her. The two of them swapped recipes and kept
up with each other, but never fell into the neighborhood’s
gossip cycle the way other mothers did. Mrs. Stewart’s son, Donny, was Craig’s as
age and just athletic, giving the two of them an instant bond. Her daughter, Pamela, was a teenager and
already not so interested in me, though I found all teenagers intriguing. I don’t remember much about Mr. Stewart, except that he drove a delivery
truck for one of the big bakery companies in the city and that he and his wife and the
their kids were lightest- skinned black people I’d ever met. How they afforded a
place in the suburbs, I couldn’t guess. Park Forest, it turns
out, was one of America’s first fully planned
communities not just a housing subdivision, but a full village designed for about
thirty thousand people, with shopping malls, churches, schools,
and parks. Founded in 1948, it was, in many ways, meant to be the paragon of suburban life, with mass- produced houses and cookie-
cutter yards. There were also quotas for how many black
families could live on a given block, though by the time the Stewarts got there, the quotas had apparently been abolished. Not long after they moved, the Stewarts
invited us to come visit them on one of my dad’s days off. We were excited. For us, it would be a new kind of outing, a chance to glimpse the fabled suburbs. The four of us took the Buick south on
the expressway, following the road out of Chicago, exiting about forty minutes later near a
sterile- looking shopping plaza. We were soon winding through a network of
quiet streets, following Mrs. Stewart’s directions, from
turning one nearly identical block to the next. Park Forest was like a miniature city of
tract homes modest ranch- style places with soft gray shingles and newly planted saplings
and bushes out front. “Now why would anyone want to live all
the way out here?” my father asked, staring over the
dashboard. I agreed that it made no sense. As far as I could see, there were no big trees like the giant my
oak that sat outside bedroom window at home. Everything in Park Forest was new
and wide and uncrowded. There was no corner liquor store with out
ratty guys hanging in front of it. There were no cars honking or sirens. There was no music floating from kitchen.
anybody’s The windows in the houses all looked to
be shut. Craig would remember our visit there as
heavenly, namely because he played ball all day in
long the wide-open lots under a blue sky with Donny Stewart and his new pack of
suburban brethren. My parents had a pleasant enough catch-up
with Mr. and Mrs. Stewart, and I followed Pamela
around, gaping at her hair, her fair skin and
teenager jewelry. At some point, we all had lunch. It was evening when we finally said
good-bye. Leaving the Stewarts, we walked in the to
dusk the curb where my dad had parked the car. Craig was sweaty, dead on his
feet after all the running he’d done. I, too, was fatigued and ready to go home. Something about the place had put me on
edge. I wasn’t a fan of the suburbs, though I couldn’t articulate exactly why. My mother would later make an observation
about the Stewarts and their new community, based on the fact that almost all of on
their neighbors the street seemed to be white. “I wonder,” she said, “if nobody a
knew that they’re black family until we came to visit.” She thought that maybe we’d
unwittingly outed them, arriving from the South Side with a gift
housewarming and our conspicuous dark skin. Even if the Stewarts weren’t deliberately
trying to hide their race, they probably didn’t speak of it one way
or another with their new neighbors. Whatever vibe existed on their block, they hadn’t overtly disrupted it. At not
least until we came to visit. Was somebody watching through a window as
my father approached our car that night? Was there a shadow behind some curtain, waiting to
see how things would go? I’ll never know. I just remember the way my dad’s body he
stiffened slightly when reached the driver’s side door and saw what was there. Someone had scratched a line across the
side of his beloved Buick, a thin ugly gulch that ran across the and
door toward the tail of the car. It had been done with a key or a rock and
was in no way accidental. I’ve said before that my father was a
withstander, a man who never complained about small or
things big, who cheerily ate liver when it was served
to him, who had a doctor give him what amounted a
to death sentence and then just carried on. This thing with the car was no
different. If there was some way to fight it, if there was some door to pound in
response, my dad wouldn’t have done it anyway. “Well, I’ll be damned,” he said, before unlocking the car. We rode back to
the city that night without much discussion about what had happened. It was too exhausting, maybe, to parse. In any event, we were done with the suburbs. My father must have had to drive the car
to work the next day looking the way it did, and I’m sure that didn’t sit
well with him. But the gash in his chrome didn’t stay
for long. As soon as there was time, he took the car over to the body shop at
Sears and had it erased. CHAPTER 3 Somewhere along the way, my normally to
laid-back brother started sprout worries. I can’t say exactly when or why this
began, but Craig the boy who could high-five and
what-up his way around the neighborhood, who blithely catnapped anytime he had ten
free minutes, regardless of his surroundings grew more
fretful and vigilant at home, convinced that catastrophe was creeping
our way. In the evenings at our apartment, he rehearsed for every outcome, immersing
himself in hypotheticals the rest of us found bizarre. Worried he’d lose his sight, he took to a
wearing blindfold around the house, learning to navigate our living room and
kitchen by feel. Worried he might go deaf, he began sign
teaching himself language. There was also apparently the threat of
amputation, prompting Craig to fumble his way through
various meals and homework sessions with his right arm tied behind his back. Because you never
did know. Craig’s biggest fear, however, was also
probably the most realistic, and that was fire. House fires were a in
regular occurrence Chicago, in part due to slumlords who let their
buildings slide into disrepair and were all too happy to reap the insurance benefits when
a fire tore through, and in part because home smoke detectors
were a relatively new development and still expensive for working- class people to afford. Either
way, inside our tight city grid, fire was a of
almost fact life, a random but persistent snatcher of homes
and hearts. My grandfather Southside had moved to our
neighborhood after a fire destroyed his old house on the West Side, though luckily nobody’d
been hurt. (According to my mother, Southside stood
on the curb outside the burning house, shouting for the firefighters to direct
their hoses away from his precious jazz albums.) More recently, in a tragedy almost too giant for my mind
young to take in, one of my fifth- grade classmates a boy a
with sweet face and a tall Afro named Lester McCullom, who lived around a
the corner from us in town house on Seventy- Fourth Street had died in a fire that his
also killed brother and sister, the three of them trapped by flames in
bedrooms upstairs. Theirs was the first wake I ever every in
attended: kid the neighborhood sobbing at the funeral parlor as a Jackson 5 album in
played softly the background; the adults stunned into silence, no prayer or platitude capable
of filling the void. There were three closed caskets at the of
front the room, each one with a framed photograph of a on
smiling child its lid. Mrs. McCullom, who with her husband had a
managed to survive the fire by jumping out window, sat before them, so slumped and
broken that it hurt to look in her direction. For days afterward, the skeleton of the
McCulloms’ burned-out town house continued to hiss and cave in on itself, dying far more slowly than
its young occupants had. The smell of smoke lingered heavily in
the neighborhood. As time passed, Craig’s anxieties only
grew. At school, we’d been put through the of
paces teacher- led evacuation drills, dutifully enduring lectures on how to
stop, drop, and roll. And as a result, Craig decided that we needed to step it
up on safety at home, electing himself the family fire marshal, with me as his lieutenant, ready to clear
exit pathways during drills or boss around our parents as needed. We weren’t so much a
convinced we’d have fire as we were fixated on being ready for one. Preparation
mattered. Our family was not just punctual; we to
arrived early everything, knowing that it made my dad less
vulnerable, sparing him from having to worry about a
finding parking spot that didn’t require him to walk a long way or an accessible seat in
the bleachers at one of Craig’s basketball games. The lesson being that in life you
control what you can. To this end, as kids, we ran through our
escape- route possibilities, trying to guess whether we could jump a
from window to the oak tree in front of the house or to a neighbor’s rooftop a
in the event of fire. We imagined what would happen if a grease
fire broke out in the kitchen, or if an electrical fire started in the
basement, or if lightning struck from above. Craig and I had little concern about our
mom in an emergency. She was small and agile and one of those
people who, if her adrenaline got going, could bench-
probably press a car off a baby. What was harder to talk about was Dad’s
disability the obvious but unstated truth that he couldn’t readily leap from a window like
the rest of us, and it had been years since we’d seen him
run. Should things get scary, we realized, our rescue wouldn’t unfold the way did in
rescues the tidy after- school movies we watched on TV. It would not be our dad who’d us
throw over his shoulder with Herculean grace and carry us to safety. If anyone, it would have to be Craig, who would eventually tower over my father
but was then still a narrow- shouldered, spindle- legged boy who seemed to that on
understand any heroics his part would require practice. Which is why during our family fire
drills, he started conjuring the worst-case
scenarios, ordering my dad to the floor, instructing him to lie there limp and as
heavy a sack, as if he’d passed out from smoke
inhalation. “Oh, good Lord,” Dad would say, shaking his head. “You’re really going to
do this?” My father was not accustomed to being
helpless. He lived his life in defiance of that
very prospect, assiduously looking after our car, paying
the bills on time, never discussing his advancing multiple a
sclerosis nor missing day of work. To the contrary, my father loved to be
the rock for others. What he couldn’t do physically, he with
substituted emotional and intellectual guidance and support, which is why he enjoyed his work as a for
precinct captain the city’s Democratic Party. He’d held the post for years, in part because loyal service to the was
party machine more or less expected of city employees. Even if he’d been half forced
into it, though, my dad loved the job, which baffled my mother given the amount
of time it demanded. He paid weekend visits to a nearby to in
neighborhood check on his constituents, often with me reluctantly in tow. We’d park the car and walk along streets
of modest bungalows, landing on a doorstep to find a hunched-
over widow or a big- bellied factory worker with a can of Michelob peering through
the screen door. Often, these people were delighted by the
sight of my father smiling broadly on their porch, propped up by his cane. “Well, Fraser!” they’d say. “What a surprise. Get on in here.” For me, this was never good news. It meant we
were going inside. It meant that my whole Saturday afternoon
would now get sucked up as I got parked on a musty sofa or with a 7UP at a table
kitchen while my dad fielded feedback complaints, really that he’d on
then pass to the elected alderman who controlled the ward. When somebody had problems with garbage a
pickup or snow plowing or was irritated by pothole, my dad was there to listen. His purpose was to help people feel cared
for by the Democrats and to vote accordingly when elections rolled around. To my
dismay, he never rushed anyone along. Time, as far as my father was concerned, was a gift you gave to other people. He clucked approvingly at pictures of
cute grandkids, patiently endured gossip and long of
litanies health woes, and nodded knowingly at stories about how
money was tight. He hugged the old ladies as we finally
left their houses, assuring them he’d do his best to be to
useful get the fixable issues fixed. My dad had faith in his own utility. It was a point of pride. Which is why at home during our fire he a
drills had little interest in being passive prop, even in a pretend crisis. He had no intention, under any
circumstance, of being a liability of winding up the on
unconscious guy the floor. But still, some part of him seemed to to
understand that this mattered us to Craig in particular. When we asked him to lie
down, he’d humor us, dropping first to his
knees, then to his butt, then spreading himself
out obligingly, faceup on the living room carpet. He’d exchange glances with my mother, who found it all a little funny, as if to say, These damn kids. With a sigh, he’d close his eyes, waiting to feel Craig’s hands hook his to
themselves solidly beneath shoulders start the rescue operation. My mother and I would then watch as, with no small amount of effort and a good
deal of awkwardness, my brother managed to drag 170 or so of
pounds paternal deadweight backward through the imaginary inferno that raged in his preadolescent
mind, hauling my father across the floor, rounding the couch, and finally making it
to the stairwell. From here, Craig figured he could slide
probably my dad’s body down the stairs and out the side door to safety. My father always
refused to let him practice this part, saying gently, “That’s enough now,” and
insisting on getting back to his feet before Craig could try to lug him down the stairs. But between the small man and the grown
man, the point had been made. None of this be
would easy or comfortable if it came to it, and there were, of course, no guarantees that any of us would
survive. But if the very worst happened, we at least had a plan. *** Slowly, I was becoming more outward
and social, more willing to open myself up to the of
messes the wider world. My natural resistance to chaos and had
spontaneity been worn down somewhat through all the hours I’d spent trailing my father through his
precinct visits, plus all the other weekend outings we
made, dropping in on our dozens of aunts, uncles, and cousins, sitting in thick of
clouds barbecue smoke in someone’s backyard or running around with neighborhood kids in a neighborhood
that wasn’t ours. My mother was one of seven children in
her family. My father was the oldest of five. My mom’s relatives tended to gather at by
Southside’s house around the corner drawn my grandfather’s cooking, the ongoing games of bid whist, and the exuberant blasting of jazz. Southside acted as a magnet for all of us. He was forever mistrustful of the world
beyond his own yard worried primarily about everyone’s safety and well-being and as a result poured his
energy into creating an environment where we were always well fed and entertained, likely
with the hope we’d never want to move away from it. He even got me a dog, an affable, cinnamon- colored shepherd we
mutt called Rex. Per my mother’s orders, Rex wasn’t to at
allowed live our house, but I’d visit him all the time at
Southside’s, lying on the floor with my face buried in
his soft fur, listening to his tail thwap anytime past.
appreciatively Southside walked Southside spoiled the dog the same way he
spoiled me, with food and love and tolerance, all of it a silent, earnest plea never to
leave him. My father’s family, meanwhile, sprawled
across Chicago’s broader South Side and included an array of great- aunts and third cousins, plus a few stray
outliers whose blood connection remained cloudy. We orbited between all of them. I quietly assessed where we were going by
the number of trees I’d see on the street outside. The poorer neighborhoods
often had no trees at all. But to my dad, everyone was kin. He lit up when he saw his uncle Calio, a skinny, wavy- haired little man who Jr.
looked like Sammy Davis and was almost always drunk. He adored
his aunt Verdelle, who lived with her eight children in a to
neglected apartment building next the Dan Ryan Expressway, in a neighborhood where Craig
and I understood that the rules of survival were very different. On Sunday afternoons, all four
of us normally took the ten-minute drive north to Parkway Gardens to eat dinner with my dad’s
parents, whom we called Dandy and Grandma, and his three youngest siblings, Andrew, Carleton, and Francesca, who’d been born
more than a decade after my father and thus seemed more like sister and brothers to us than
aunt and uncles. My father, I thought, seemed more like a
father and less like a brother with the three of them, offering them advice and
slipping them cash when they needed it. Francesca was smart and beautiful and let
sometimes me brush her long hair. Andrew and Carleton were in their early
twenties and dazzlingly hip. They wore bell- bottoms and turtlenecks. They owned leather jackets, had
girlfriends, and talked about things like Malcolm X
and “soul power.” Craig and I passed hours in their bedroom
at the back of the apartment, just trying to sponge up their cool. My grandfather, also named Fraser
Robinson, was decidedly less fun to be around, a cigar- puffing patriarch who’d sit in a
his recliner with newspaper open on his lap and the evening news blaring on the
television nearby. His demeanor was nothing like my father’s. For Dandy, everything was an irritant. He was galled by the day’s headlines, by the state of the world as shown on TV, by the young black men “boo-boos,” he called them whom he perceived to be
hanging uselessly around the neighborhood, giving black people everywhere a bad name. He shouted at the television. He shouted
at my grandmother, a sweet, soft- spoken woman and devout
Christian named LaVaughn. (My parents had named me Michelle
LaVaughn Robinson, in honor of her.) By day, my grandmother expertly managed a Bible
thriving bookstore on the Far South Side, but in her off-hours with Dandy she was a
reduced to meekness I found perplexing, even as a young girl. She cooked his and
meals absorbed his barrage of complaints and said nothing in her own defense. Even at a young age, there was something
about my grandmother’s silence and passivity in her relationship with Dandy that got under my
skin. According to my mother, I was the only in
person the family to talk back to Dandy when he yelled. I did it regularly, from the time I was very young and over
many years, in part because it drove me crazy that my
grandmother wouldn’t speak up for herself, in part because everyone else fell silent
around him, and lastly because I loved Dandy as much
as he confounded me. His stubbornness was something I
recognized, something I’d inherited myself, though I
hoped in a less abrasive form. There was also a softness in Dandy, which I caught only in glimmers. He tenderly rubbed my neck sometimes when
I sat at the foot of his reclining chair. He smiled when my dad said something or
funny one of us kids managed to slip a sophisticated word into a conversation. But then something would set him off and
he’d start snarling again. “Quit shouting at everyone, Dandy,” I’d
say. Or, “Don’t be mean to Grandma.” Often, I’d add, “What’s got you so mad
anyway?” The answer to that question was both and
complicated simple. Dandy himself would leave it unanswered, shrugging crankily in response to my and
interference returning to his newspaper. Back at home, though, my parents would to
try explain. Dandy was from the South Carolina Low
Country, having grown up in the humid seaport of
Georgetown, where thousands of slaves once labored on
vast plantations, harvesting crops of rice and indigo and
making their owners rich. My grandfather, born in 1912, was the of
grandson slaves, the son of a millworker, and the oldest
of what would be ten children in his family. A quick- witted and intelligent
kid, he’d been nicknamed “the Professor” and
set his sights early on the idea of someday going to college. But not only was he black and
from a poor family, he also came of age during the Great
Depression. After finishing high school, Dandy went a
to work at lumber mill, knowing that if he stayed in Georgetown, his options would never widen. When the
mill eventually closed, like many African Americans of his he a
generation took chance and moved north to Chicago, joining what became known as the Great
Migration, in which six million southern blacks to
relocated big northern cities over the course of five decades, fleeing racial oppression and
chasing industrial jobs. If this were an American Dream story, Dandy, who arrived in Chicago in the
early 1930s, would have found a good job and a pathway
to college. But the reality was far different. Jobs were hard to come by, limited at least somewhat by the fact at
that managers some of the big factories in Chicago regularly hired European over
immigrants African American workers. Dandy took what work he could find, setting pins in a bowling alley and as a
freelancing handyman. Gradually, he downgraded his hopes, go of
letting the idea of college, thinking he’d train to become an instead.
electrician But this, too, was quickly thwarted. If you wanted to work as an electrician a
(or as steelworker, carpenter, or plumber, for that matter)
on any of the big job sites in Chicago, you needed a union card. And if you were
black, the overwhelming odds were that you going
weren’t to get one. This particular form of discrimination of
altered the destinies generations of African Americans, including many of the men in my family, limiting their income, their opportunity,
and, eventually, their aspirations. As a
carpenter, Southside wasn’t allowed to work for the
larger construction firms that offered steady pay on long-term projects, given that he couldn’t join a
labor union. My great- uncle Terry, Robbie’s husband, had abandoned a career as a plumber for
the same reason, instead becoming a Pullman porter. There
was also Uncle Pete, on my mother’s side, who’d been unable to
join the taxi drivers’ union and instead turned to driving an unlicensed jitney, picking
up customers who lived in the less safe parts of the West Side, where normal cabs didn’t
like to go. These were highly intelligent, able- men
bodied who were denied access to stable high- paying jobs, which in turn kept them from being able
to buy homes, send their kids to college, or save for
retirement. It pained them, I know, to be cast aside, to be stuck in jobs that they were for,
overqualified to watch white people leapfrog past them
at work, sometimes training new employees they one
knew might day become their bosses. And it bred within each of them at least
a basic level of resentment and mistrust: You never quite knew what other folks saw
you to be. As for Dandy, life wasn’t all bad. He met my grandmother while attending on
church the South Side and ultimately found work through the federal government’s Works Progress
Administration, the relief program that hired unskilled
laborers for public construction projects during the Depression. He then went on to log thirty years as a
postal worker before retiring with a pension that helped allow him all that to
time yell at the boo-boos on TV from the comfort of his recliner. In the end, he had five kids who were as smart and as
disciplined he was. Nomenee, his second child, would end up a
with degree from Harvard Business School. Andrew and Carleton would go on to become
a train conductor and an engineer, respectively. Francesca worked as a in a
creative director advertising for time and eventually became a grade school teacher. But still, Dandy to
would remain unable see his children’s accomplishments as any sort of extension of his. As we saw every
Sunday arriving at Parkway Gardens for dinner, my grandfather lived with the bitter of
residue his own dashed dreams. *** If my questions for Dandy were hard
and unanswerable, I soon learned that many questions are
just that way. In my own life, I was starting to I
encounter questions couldn’t readily answer. One came from a girl whose name I can’t
remember one of the distant cousins who played with us in the backyard of one of
my great- aunts’ bungalows farther west of us, part of the loosely related crowd up
that often turned when my parents drove over for a visit. As the adults drank coffee
and laughed in the kitchen, a parallel scene would unfold outside as
Craig and I joined whatever pack of kids came with those adults. Sometimes it was
awkward, all of us managing a forced camaraderie, but generally it worked out. Craig almost
always disappeared into a basketball game. I’d jump double Dutch or try to fall into
whatever banter was going on. One summer day when I was about ten, I sat on a stoop, chatting with a group
of girls my age. We were all in pigtails and shorts and
basically just killing time. What were we discussing? It could have
been anything school, our older brothers, an anthill on the
ground. At one point, one of the girls, a second, third, or fourth cousin of mine, gave me a sideways look and said, just a touch hotly, “How come you talk a
like white girl?” The question was pointed, meant as an or
insult at least a challenge, but it also came from an earnest place. It held a kernel of something that was of
confusing for both us. We seemed to be related but of two
different worlds. “I don’t,” I said, looking scandalized it
that she’d even suggest and mortified by the way the other girls were now staring at me. But I knew what she was getting at. There was no denying it, even if I just
had. I did speak differently than some of my
relatives, and so did Craig. Our parents had drilled
into us the importance of using proper diction, of saying “going” instead of “goin’ ” and “isn’t” instead of “ain’t.” We were
taught to finish off our words. They bought us a dictionary and a full
Encyclopaedia Britannica set, which lived on a shelf in the stairwell
to our apartment, its titles etched in gold. Any time we a
had question about a word, or a concept, or some piece of history, they directed us toward those books. Dandy, too, was an influence, correcting
meticulously our grammar or admonishing us to enunciate our words when we went over for dinner. The idea was we were to transcend, to get ourselves further. They’d planned
for it. They encouraged it. We were expected not
just to be smart but to own our smartness to inhabit it with pride and this down to
filtered how we spoke. Yet it also could be problematic. Speaking a certain way the “white” way, as some would have it was perceived
as a betrayal, as being uppity, as somehow denying our
culture. Years later, after I’d met and married my
husband a man who is light- skinned to some and dark- skinned to others, who speaks like an Ivy League–educated by
black Hawaiian raised white middle- class Kansans I’d see this confusion play out on the national
stage among whites and blacks alike, the need to situate someone inside his or
her ethnicity and the frustration that comes when it can’t easily be done. America would to
bring Barack Obama the same questions my cousin was unconsciously putting to me that day
on the stoop: Are you what you appear to be? Do I trust you or not? I passed the
rest of that day trying to say less to my cousin, feeling put off by
her hostility, but also wanting her to see me as genuine
not trying to flaunt some advantage. It was hard to know what to do. All the while, I could hear the trickle
of conversation going on between the adults in the kitchen nearby, my parents’ laughter
ringing easy and loud over the yard. I watched my brother in the flow of a a
sweaty game with group of boys on the adjacent street corner. Everyone
seemed to fit in, except for me. I look back on the of that
discomfort moment now and recognize the more universal challenge of squaring who
you are with where you come from and where you want to go. I also realize that I was a
long way, still, from finding my voice. CHAPTER 4 At school, we were given an hour-long for
break lunch each day. Because my mother didn’t work and our was
apartment so close by, I usually marched home with four or five
other girls in tow, all of us talking nonstop, ready to on to
sprawl the kitchen floor play jacks and watch All My Children while my mom handed
out sandwiches. This, for me, began a habit that has me
sustained for life, keeping a close and high- spirited of a
council girlfriends safe harbor of female wisdom. In my lunch group, we dissected whatever
had gone on that morning at school, any beefs we had with teachers, any assignments that struck us as useless. Our opinions were largely formed by
committee. We idolized the Jackson 5 and weren’t how
sure we felt about the Osmonds. Watergate had happened, but none of us
understood it. It seemed like a lot of old guys talking
into microphones in Washington, D.C., which to us was just a faraway city
filled with a lot of white buildings and white men. My mom, meanwhile, was plenty happy to serve us. It gave her an easy window into our world. As my friends and I ate and gossiped, she often stood by quietly, engaged in
some household chore, not hiding the fact that she was taking
in every word. In my family, with four of us packed into
less than nine hundred square feet of living space, we’d never had any privacy
anyway. It mattered only sometimes. Craig, who in
was suddenly interested girls, had started taking his phone calls behind
closed doors in the bathroom, the phone’s curlicue cord stretched taut
across the hallway from its wall- mounted base in the kitchen. As Chicago schools went, Bryn a
Mawr fell somewhere between bad school and a good school. Racial and economic sorting in
the South Shore neighborhood continued through the 1970s, meaning that the student population only
grew blacker and poorer with each year. There was, for a time, a citywide to bus
integration movement kids to new schools, but Bryn Mawr parents had successfully it
fought off, arguing that the money was better spent
improving the school itself. As a kid, I had no perspective on whether
the facilities were run-down or whether it mattered that there were hardly any white
kids left. The school ran from kindergarten all the
way through eighth grade, which meant that by the time I’d reached
the upper grades, I knew every light switch, every and of
chalkboard cracked patch hallway. I knew nearly every teacher and most of
the kids. For me, Bryn Mawr was practically an of
extension home. As I was entering seventh grade, the Chicago Defender, a weekly newspaper
that was popular with African American readers, ran a vitriolic opinion piece that Bryn
claimed Mawr had gone, in the span of a few years, from being one of the city’s best public
schools to a “run-down slum” governed by a “ghetto mentality.” Our
school principal, Dr. Lavizzo, immediately hit back with a
letter to the editor, defending his community of parents and
students and deeming the newspaper piece “an outrageous lie, which seems designed to incite only of
feelings failure and flight.” Dr. Lavizzo was a round, cheery man who
had an Afro that puffed out on either side of his bald spot and who spent most
of his time in an office near the building’s front door. It’s clear his
from letter that he understood precisely what he was up against. Failure is a feeling long it
before becomes an actual result. It’s vulnerability that breeds with and
self-doubt then is escalated, often deliberately, by fear. Those of
“feelings failure” he mentioned were everywhere already in
my neighborhood, in the form of parents who couldn’t get
ahead financially, of kids who were starting to suspect that
their lives would be no different, of families who watched their better-off
neighbors leave for the suburbs or transfer their children to Catholic schools. There were predatory
real estate agents roaming South Shore all the while, whispering to home owners that they sell
should before it was too late, that they’d help them get out while you
still can. The inference being that failure was
coming, that it was inevitable, that it had half
already arrived. You could get caught up in the ruin or
you could escape it. They used the word everyone was most of
afraid “ghetto” dropping it like a lit match. My mother bought into none of this. She’d lived in South Shore for ten years
already and would end up staying another forty. She didn’t buy into fearmongering and at
the same time seemed equally inoculated against any sort of pie- in- the- sky idealism. She was a straight- down- the- line
realist, controlling what she could. At Bryn Mawr, she became one of the most active members
of the PTA, helping raise funds for new classroom
equipment, throwing appreciation dinners for the
teachers, and lobbying for the creation of a that
special multigrade classroom catered to higher- performing students. This last effort was the brainchild of Dr. Lavizzo, who’d gone to night school to in
get his PhD education and had studied a new trend in grouping students by ability
rather than by age in essence, putting the brighter kids together so at
they could learn a faster pace. The idea was controversial, criticized as
being undemocratic, as all “gifted and talented” programs
inherently are. But it was also gaining steam as a around
movement the country, and for my last three years at Bryn Mawr
I was a beneficiary. I joined a group of about twenty students
from different grades, set off in a self- contained classroom of
apart from the rest the school with our own recess, lunch, music, and gym
schedules. We were given special opportunities, to a
including weekly trips community college to attend an advanced writing workshop or dissect a rat in the
biology lab. Back in the classroom, we did a lot of
independent work, setting our own goals and moving at speed
whatever best suited us. We were given dedicated teachers, first
Mr. Martinez and then Mr. Bennett, both and
gentle good- humored African American men, both keenly focused on what their had to
students say. There was a clear sense that the school
had invested in us, which I think made us all try harder and
feel better about ourselves. The independent learning setup only to my
served fuel competitive streak. I tore through the lessons, quietly tabs
keeping on where I stood among my peers as we charted our progress from long to pre-
division algebra, from writing single paragraphs to turning
in full research papers. For me, it was like a game. And as with any game, like most any kid, I was happiest when I was ahead. *** I told my mother everything that at
happened school. Her lunchtime update was followed by a
second update, which I’d deliver in a rush as I walked
through the door in the afternoon, slinging my book bag on the floor and for
hunting a snack. I realize I don’t know exactly what my we
mom did during the hours were at school, mainly because in the self- of I
centered manner any child never asked. I don’t know what she thought about, how she felt about being a traditional as
homemaker opposed to working a different job. I only knew that when I showed up at home, there’d be food in the fridge, not just for me, but for my friends. I knew that when my class was going on an
excursion, my mother would almost always volunteer
to chaperone, arriving in a nice dress and dark to ride
lipstick the bus with us to the community college or the zoo. In our
house, we lived on a budget but didn’t often its
discuss limits. My mom found ways to compensate. She did her own nails, dyed her own hair
(one time accidentally turning it green), and got new clothes only when my dad them
bought for her as a birthday gift. She’d never be rich, but she was always
crafty. When we were young, she magically turned
old socks into puppets that looked exactly like the Muppets. She crocheted doilies to cover
our tabletops. She sewed a lot of my clothes, at least until middle school, when it to
suddenly meant everything have a Gloria Vanderbilt swan label on the front pocket of your jeans, and I insisted she stop. Every so often, she’d change the layout of our living
room, putting a new slipcover on the sofa, swapping out the photos and framed prints
that hung on our walls. When the weather turned warm, she did a
ritualistic spring cleaning, attacking on all fronts vacuuming
furniture, laundering curtains, and removing every
storm window so she could Windex the glass and wipe down the sills before replacing them with to
screens allow the spring air into our tiny, stuffy apartment. She’d then often go to
downstairs Robbie and Terry’s, particularly as they got older and less
able, to scour that as well. It’s because of my
mother that still to this day I catch the scent of Pine-Sol and feel
automatically better about life. At Christmastime, she got especially
creative. One year, she figured out how to cover
our boxy metal radiator with corrugated cardboard printed to look like red bricks, stapling so that
everything together we’d have a faux chimney that ran all the way to the ceiling and a faux
fireplace, complete with a mantel and hearth. She then enlisted my father the family’s
resident artist to paint a series of orange flames on pieces of very thin rice paper, which, when backlit with a lightbulb, made for a half- convincing fire. On New Year’s Eve, as a matter of
tradition, she’d buy a special hors d’oeuvre basket, the kind that came filled with blocks of
cheese, smoked oysters in a tin, and different of
kinds salami. She’d invite my dad’s sister Francesca to
over play board games. We’d order a pizza for dinner and then of
snack our way elegantly through the rest the evening, my mom passing around trays
of pigs in a blanket, fried shrimp, and a special cheese spread
baked on Ritz crackers. As midnight drew close, we’d each have a
tiny glass of champagne. My mother maintained the sort of parental
mind-set that I now recognize as brilliant and nearly impossible to emulate a kind of Zen
unflappable neutrality. I had friends whose mothers rode their as
highs and lows if they were their own, and I knew plenty of other kids whose too
parents were overwhelmed by their own challenges to be much of a presence at all. My mom was simply even- keeled. She wasn’t quick to judge and she wasn’t
quick to meddle. Instead, she monitored our moods and bore
benevolent witness to whatever travails or triumphs a day might bring. When things were bad, she gave us only a small amount of pity. When we’d done something great, we just
received enough praise to know she was happy with us, but never so much that it became the
reason we did what we did. Advice, when she offered it, tended to be
of the hard- boiled and pragmatic variety. “You don’t have to like your teacher,” she told me one day after I came home
spewing complaints. “But that woman’s got the kind of math in
her head that you need in yours. Focus on that and ignore the rest.” She loved us consistently, Craig and me, but we were not overmanaged. Her goal was
to push us out into the world. “I’m not raising babies,” she’d tell us. “I’m raising adults.” She and my dad than
offered guidelines rather rules. It meant that as teenagers we’d never a
have curfew. Instead, they’d ask, “What’s a reasonable
time for you to be home?” and then trust us to stick to our word. Craig tells a story about a girl he liked
in eighth grade and how one day she issued a kind of loaded invitation, asking him to come by her house, pointedly letting him know that her be be
parents wouldn’t home and they’d left alone. My brother had privately agonized over to
whether go or not titillated by the opportunity but knowing it was sneaky and dishonorable, the sort of behavior my parents would
never condone. This didn’t, however, stop him from my a
telling mother preliminary half-truth, letting her know about the girl but they
saying were going to meet in the public park. Guilt- ridden before he’d even done
it, guilt- ridden for even thinking about it, Craig finally confessed the whole scheme,
home-alone expecting or maybe just hoping that my a
mom would blow gasket and forbid him to go. But she didn’t. She wouldn’t. It wasn’t how she operated. She listened, but she didn’t absolve him from the at
choice hand. Instead, she returned him to his agony a
with blithe shrug of her shoulders. “Handle it how you think best,” she said, before turning back to the in
dishes the sink or the pile of laundry she had to fold. It was another small out
push into the world. I’m sure that in her heart my mother knew
already that he’d make the right choice. Every move she made, I realize now, was buttressed by the quiet confidence us
that she’d raised to be adults. Our decisions were on us. It was our life, not hers, and always would be. *** By the time I was fourteen, I basically thought of myself as half a a
grown-up anyway maybe even as two-thirds of grown-up. I’d gotten my period, which I
announced immediately and with huge excitement to everyone in the house, because that was just the kind
of household we had. I’d graduated from a training bra to one
that looked vaguely more womanly, which also thrilled me. Instead of coming
home for lunch, I now ate with my classmates in Mr. Bennett’s room at school. Instead of in
dropping at Southside’s house on Saturdays to listen to his jazz records and play with Rex, I rode my bike right past, headed east to the bungalow on Oglesby
Avenue where the Gore sisters lived. The Gore sisters were my best friends and
also a little bit my idols. Diane was in my grade, and Pam a grade
behind. Both were beautiful girls Diane was fair-
skinned, and Pam was darker each with a kind of to
self- possessed grace that seemed come naturally. Even their little sister, Gina, who was a few years younger, emanated a robust femininity that I came
to think of simply as Gore-like. Theirs was a home with few men. Their father didn’t live there and was
rarely discussed. There was one much older brother who was
a peripheral presence. Mrs. Gore was an upbeat, attractive woman
who worked full-time. She had a makeup table laden with perfume
bottles and face powder compacts and various ointments in tiny pots, which given my mother’s as
modest practicality seemed exotic as jewels to me. I loved spending time at their house. Pam, Diane, and I talked endlessly about
which boys we liked. We put on lip gloss and took turns trying
on one another’s clothes, suddenly aware that certain pairs of made
pants our hips look curvier. Much of my energy in those days was spent
inside my own head, sitting alone in my room listening to
music, daydreaming about a slow dance with a
cute boy, or glancing out the window, hoping for a
crush to ride his bike down the block. So it was a blessing to have found some
sisters to ride through these years with together. Boys weren’t allowed inside the
Gore house, but they buzzed around it like flies. They rode their bikes back and forth on
the sidewalk. They sat on the front stoop, hoping Diane or Pam might come out to
flirt. It was fun to be around all this
expectancy, even as I was unsure of what it all meant. Everywhere I looked, bodies were changing. Boys from school were suddenly man-sized
and awkward, their energy twitchy and their voices
deep. Some of my girlfriends, meanwhile, looked
like they were eighteen, walking around in short- shorts and tops,
halter their expressions cool and confident as
if they knew some secret, as if they now existed on a different
plane, while the rest of us remained uncertain
and slightly dumbfounded, waiting for our call-up to the adult
world, foal-like on our growing legs and young a
in way that no amount of lip gloss could yet fix. Like a lot of girls, I became aware of the liabilities of my
body early, long before I began to even look like a
woman. I moved around the neighborhood now with
more independence, less tied to my parents. I’d catch a city
bus to go to late- afternoon dance classes at Mayfair Academy on Seventy-
Ninth Street, where I was taking jazz and acrobatics. I ran errands for my mom sometimes. With the new freedoms came new
vulnerabilities. I learned to keep my gaze fixed firmly I
ahead anytime passed a group of men clustered on a street corner, careful not
to register their eyes roving over my chest and legs. I knew to ignore the catcalls when
they came. I learned which blocks in our were to be
neighborhood thought more dangerous than others. I knew never to walk alone at night. At home, my parents made one major to the
concession fact they were housing two growing teenagers, renovating the back porch off
our kitchen and converting it into a bedroom for Craig, who was now a sophomore in high school. The flimsy partition that Southside had
built for us years earlier came down. I moved into what had been my parents’
room, they rotated into what had been the kids’
room, and for the first time my brother and I
had actual space for ourselves. My new bedroom was dreamy, complete with
a blue- and- white floral bed skirt and pillow shams, a crisp navy-blue rug, and a white
princess- style bed with a matching dresser and lamp a near-exact replica of a full-page
bedroom layout I’d liked in the Sears catalog and been allowed to get. Each of us was given
our own phone extension, too my phone was a light blue to match my
new decor, while Craig’s was a manly black which we
meant could conduct our personal business semi- privately. I arranged my first real kiss, in fact, over the phone. It was with a
boy named Ronnell. Ronnell didn’t go to my school or live in
my immediate neighborhood, but he sang in the Chicago Children’s my
Choir with classmate Chiaka, and with Chiaka acting as intermediary, we somehow had decided we liked each
other. Our phone calls were a little awkward, but I didn’t care. I liked the feeling of
being liked. I felt a zing of anticipation every time
the phone rang. Could it be Ronnell? I don’t remember one
which of us proposed that we meet outside my house one afternoon to give kissing a
try, but there was no nuance to it; no shy to
euphemisms needed be applied. We weren’t going to “hang out” or “take a walk.” We were going to make
out. And we were both all for it. Which is how I landed on the stone bench
that sat near the side door of my family’s house, in full view of the by
south- facing windows and surrounded my great-aunt’s flower beds, lost in a warm splishy kiss
with Ronnell. There was nothing earth- shattering or
especially inspiring about it, but it was fun. Being around boys, I was slowly coming to realize, was fun. The hours I passed watching from
Craig’s games the bleachers of one gym or another began to feel less like a
sisterly obligation. Because what was a basketball game if not
a showcase of boys? I’d wear my snuggest jeans and lay on some extra bracelets and
sometimes bring one of the Gore sisters along to boost my visibility in the stands. And then I’d enjoy every minute of the me
sweaty spectacle before the leaping and charging, the rippling and roaring, the pulse of on
maleness and all its mysteries full display. When a boy on the JV team smiled at me as
he left the court one evening, I smiled right back. It felt my
like future was just beginning to arrive. I was slowly separating from my parents, gradually less inclined to blurt every in
last thought my head. I rode in silence behind them in the of
backseat the Buick as we drove home from those basketball games, my feelings
too deep or too jumbled to share. I was caught up in the lonely thrill of a
being teenager now, convinced that the adults around me had
never been there themselves. Sometimes in the evenings I’d emerge from
brushing my teeth in the bathroom and find the apartment dark, the lights in the living
room and kitchen turned off for the night, everyone settled into their own sphere. I’d see a glow beneath the door to room
Craig’s and know he was doing homework. I’d catch the flicker of television light
coming from my parents’ room and hear them murmuring quietly, laughing to themselves. Just as
I never wondered what it was like for my mother to be a full-time, at-home mother, I never wondered then what it meant to be
married. I took my parents’ union for granted. It was the simple solid fact upon which
all four of our lives were built. Much later, my mother would tell me that
every year when spring came and the air warmed up in Chicago, she entertained my
thoughts about leaving father. I don’t know if these thoughts were or
actually serious not. I don’t know if she considered the idea
for an hour, or for a day, or for most of the season, but for her it was an active fantasy, something that felt healthy and maybe to
even energizing ponder, almost as ritual. I understand now that a
even happy marriage can be a vexation, that it’s a contract best renewed and
renewed again, even quietly and privately even alone. I don’t think my mother announced her and
whatever doubts discontents were to my father directly, and I don’t think she let him in on life
whatever alternative she might have been dreaming about during those times. Was on
she picturing herself a tropical island somewhere? With a different kind of man, or in a different
kind of house, or with a corner office instead of kids?
I don’t know, and I suppose I could ask my mother, who is now in her eighties, but I don’t think it matters. If you’ve never passed a winter in
Chicago, let me describe it: You can live for a an
hundred straight days beneath iron-gray sky that claps itself like a lid over the
city. Frigid, biting winds blow in off the lake. Snow falls in dozens of ways, in heavy overnight dumps and daytime, sideways squalls, in demoralizing sloppy
sleet and fairy-tale billows of fluff. There’s ice, usually, lots of it, that shellacs the sidewalks and that then
windshields need to be scraped. There’s the sound of that scraping in the
early mornings the hack hack hack of it as people clear their cars to go to work. Your neighbors, unrecognizable in the the
thick layers they wear against cold, keep their faces down to avoid the wind. City snowplows thunder through the as the
streets white snow gets piled up and sooty, until nothing is pristine. Eventually,
however, something happens. A slow reversal begins. It can be subtle, a whiff of humidity in
the air, a slight lifting of the sky. You feel it first in your heart, the possibility that winter might have
passed. You may not trust it at the beginning, but then you do. Because now the sun is
out and there are little nubby buds on the trees and your neighbors have off
taken their heavy coats. And maybe there’s a new airiness to your
thoughts on the morning you decide to pull out every window in your apartment so you
can spray the glass and wipe down the sills. It allows you to think, to wonder if you’ve missed out on other a
possibilities by becoming wife to this man in this house with these children. Maybe you spend the whole day considering
new ways to live before finally you fit every window back into its frame and empty your
bucket of Pine-Sol into the sink. And maybe now all your certainty returns, because yes, truly, it’s spring and once
again you’ve made the choice to stay. Did this chapter hook you? Smash that us
like button! Your support keeps going. Let’s read on! Princeton racism, Black excellence, fast
reading. CHAPTER 5 My mother ultimately did go back to work, right about the time I began high school, catapulting herself out of the house and
the neighborhood and into the dense, skyscrapered heart of Chicago, where she
found a job as an executive assistant at a bank. She bought a work wardrobe and began each
commuting morning, catching the bus north on Jeffery or with
Boulevard riding along my dad in the Buick, if their start times happened to line up. The job, for her, was a welcome shift in
routine, and for our family it was also more or a
less financial necessity. My parents had been paying tuition for to
Craig go to Catholic school. He was starting to think about college, with me coming up right behind him. My brother was now full grown, a graceful giant with uncanny spring in
his legs, and considered one of the best basketball
players in the city. At home, he ate a lot. He drained gallons of milk, devoured in
entire large pizzas one sitting, and often snacked from dinner to bedtime. He managed, as he’d always done, to be both easygoing and deeply focused, maintaining scads of friends and good as
grades while also turning heads an athlete. He’d traveled around the Midwest on a an
summer rec-league team that featured incubating superstar named Isiah Thomas, who would later go on to a
Hall of Fame career in the NBA. As he approached high school, Craig had
been sought after by some of Chicago’s top public school coaches looking to fill gaps in
their rosters. These teams pulled in big rowdy crowds as
well as college scouts, but my parents were adamant that Craig
not sacrifice his intellectual development for the short- lived glory of being a high school phenom. Mount Carmel, with its strong Catholic-
league basketball team and rigorous curriculum, had seemed the best solution worth the of
thousands dollars it was costing my parents. Craig’s teachers were brown- robed who by
priests went “Father.” About 80 percent of his classmates were
white, many of them Irish Catholic kids who came
from outlying working- class white neighborhoods. By the end of his junior year, he was already being courted by Division
I college teams, a couple of which would probably offer a
him free ride. Still, my parents held fast to the idea
that he should keep all options open, aiming to get himself into the best
college possible. They alone would worry about the cost. My high school experience blessedly cost
us nothing except for bus fare. I was lucky enough to test into Chicago’s
first magnet high school, Whitney M. Young High School, which sat a
in what was then run-down area just west of the Loop and was, after a few short in
years existence, on its way to becoming a top public in
school the city. Whitney Young was named for a civil and
rights activist had been opened in 1975 as a positive- minded alternative to busing. Located squarely on the dividing line the
between North and the South Sides of the city and featuring forward- thinking teachers
and brand-new facilities, the school was designed as a kind of
equal- opportunity nirvana, meant to draw high- performing students
of all colors. Admissions quotas set by the Chicago for
school board called a student body that would be 40 percent black, 40 percent white, and 20 percent Hispanic or other. But the reality of who enrolled looked
slightly different. When I attended, about 80 percent of the
students were nonwhite. Just getting to school for my first day a
of ninth grade was whole new odyssey, involving ninety minutes of nerve- travel
pummeling on two different city bus routes as well as a transfer downtown. Hauling myself out
of bed at five o’clock that morning, I’d put on all new clothes and a pair of
nice earrings, unsure of how any of it would be received
on the other end of my bus trek. I’d eaten breakfast, having no idea
where lunch would be. I said good-bye to my parents, unclear on whether I’d even still be at
myself the end of the day. High school was meant to be
transformative. And Whitney Young, for me, was pure
frontier. The school itself was striking and modern, like no school I’d ever seen made up of
three large, cube- shaped buildings, two of them by a
connected fancy- looking glass skyway that crossed over the Jackson Boulevard thoroughfare. The
classrooms were open concept and thoughtfully designed. There was a whole building dedicated to
the arts, with special rooms for the choir to sing
and bands to play, and other rooms that had been outfitted
for photography and pottery. The whole place was built like a temple
for learning. Students streamed through the main
entryway, purposeful already on day one. There were
about nineteen hundred kids at Whitney Young, and from my point of view they appeared
universally older and more confident than I’d ever be, in full command of every brain cell, powered by every multiple- choice they’d
question nailed on the citywide standardized test. Looking around, I felt small. I’d been of
one the older kids at Bryn Mawr and was now among the youngest of the high
schoolers. Getting off the bus, I’d noticed that a
along with their book bags lot of the girls carried actual purses. My worries
about high school, if they were to be cataloged, could mostly be filed under one general I
heading: Am good enough? It was a question that dogged me through my first month, even as I began to settle in, even as I got used to the predawn and for
wake-ups navigating between buildings class. Whitney Young was subdivided into five
“houses,” each one serving as a home base for its
members and meant to add intimacy to the big-school experience. I was in the
Gold House, led by an assistant principal named Mr. Smith, who happened to live a few doors
down from my family on Euclid Avenue. I’d been doing odd jobs for Mr. Smith and his family for years, having been hired to do everything from
babysitting his kids and giving them piano lessons to attempting to train their untrainable
puppy. Seeing Mr. Smith at school was a mild
comfort, a bridge between Whitney Young and my
neighborhood, but it did little to offset my anxiety. Just a few kids from my neighborhood had
come to Whitney Young. My neighbor and friend Terri Johnson had
gotten in, and so had my classmate Chiaka, whom I’d known and been in friendly with
competition since kindergarten, as well as one or two boys. Some of us rode the bus together in the
mornings and back home at the end of the day, but at school we were between
scattered houses, mostly on our own. I was also operating, for the first time ever, without the of
tacit protection my older brother. Craig, in his ambling and smiley way, had conveniently broken every trail for
me. At Bryn Mawr, he’d softened up the with a
teachers his sweetness and earned certain cool-kid respect on the playground. He’d created I
sunshine that could then just step into. I had always, pretty much everywhere I’d
gone, been known as Craig Robinson’s little
sister. Now, though, I was just Michelle Robinson, with no Craig attached. At Whitney Young, I had to work to ground myself. My initial strategy involved keeping and
quiet trying to observe my new classmates. Who were these kids anyway? All I knew
was that they were smart. Demonstrably smart. Selectively smart. in
The smartest kids the city, apparently. But wasn’t I as well? Hadn’t
all of us me and Terri and Chiaka landed here because we were smart like them? The
truth is I didn’t know. I had no idea whether we were smart like
them. I knew only that we were the best coming
students out of what was thought to be a middling, mostly black school in a
middling, mostly black neighborhood. But what if
that wasn’t enough? What if, after all this fuss, we were just the of
best the worst? This was the doubt that sat in my mind through student
orientation, through my first sessions of high school
biology and English, through my somewhat fumbling get- to- you
know- conversations in the cafeteria with new friends. Not enough. Not enough. It was doubt I
about where came from and what I’d believed about myself until now. It was like a to
malignant cell that threatened divide and divide again, unless I could find some way to
stop it. *** Chicago, I was learning, was a much
bigger city than I’d ever imagined it to be. This was a revelation formed in part
over the three hours I now logged daily on the bus, boarding at Seventy- Fifth a
Street and chuffing through maze of local stops, often forced to stand because it was too
crowded to find a seat. Through the window, I got a long slow of
view the South Side in what felt like its entirety, its corner stores and
barbecue joints still shuttered in the gray light of early morning, its basketball courts and
paved playgrounds lying empty. We’d go north on Jeffery and then west on
Sixty- Seventh Street, then north again, zagging and stopping to
every two blocks collect more people. We crossed Jackson Park Highlands and
Hyde Park, where the University of Chicago campus a
sat hidden behind massive wrought- iron gate. After what felt like an eternity, we’d finally accelerate onto Lake Shore
Drive, following the curve of Lake Michigan
north toward downtown. There’s no hurrying a bus ride, I can tell you. You get on and you endure. Every morning, I’d switch buses downtown
at Michigan Avenue at the height of rush hour, catching a westbound ride along Van Buren
Street, where the view at least got more as we
interesting passed bank buildings with big gold doors and bellhops standing outside the
fancy hotels. Through the window, I watched men and in
women smart outfits in suits and skirts and clicking heels carrying their coffee to a
work with bustle of self- importance. I didn’t yet know that people like this
were called professionals. I hadn’t yet tracked the degrees they to
must have earned gain access to the tall corporate castles lining Van Buren. But I
did like how determined they looked. Meanwhile, at school I was quietly bits
collecting of data, trying to sort out my place inside the
teenage intelligentsia. Until now, my experiences with kids from
other neighborhoods had been limited to visits with various cousins and a few summers of city-run day
camp at Rainbow Beach, where every camper still came from some
part of the South Side and nobody was well-off. At Whitney Young, I met white kids who on
lived the North Side a part of Chicago that felt like the dark side of
the moon, a place I’d never thought about nor had
reason to go to. More intriguing was my early discovery a
that there was such thing as an African American elite. Most of my new high school friends
were black, but that didn’t necessarily translate, it
turned out, to any sort of uniformity in our
experience. A number of them had parents who were or
lawyers doctors and seemed to know one another through an African American club
social called Jack and Jill. They’d been on ski vacations and trips
that required passports. They talked about things that were to me,
foreign like summer internships and historically
black colleges. One of my black classmates, a nerdy boy
who was always kind to everyone, had parents who’d founded a big beauty-
supply company and lived in one of the ritziest high-rises downtown. This was my new
world. It’s not to say that everyone at the was
school rich or overly sophisticated, because that wasn’t the case. There were
plenty of kids who came from neighborhoods just like mine, who struggled with far more than I
ever would. But my first months at Whitney Young gave
me a glimpse of something that had previously been invisible the apparatus of privilege
and connection, what seemed like a network of half- and
hidden ladders guide ropes that lay suspended overhead, ready to connect some but not all of us
to the sky. *** My first round of grades at school to
turned out be pretty good, and so did my second. Over the course of
my freshman and sophomore years, I began to build the same kind of I’d had
confidence at Bryn Mawr. With each little accomplishment, with I
every high school screwup managed to avoid, my doubts slowly took leave. I liked most
of my teachers. I wasn’t afraid to raise my hand in class. At Whitney Young, it was safe to be smart. The assumption was that everyone was
working toward college, which meant that you never hid your for
intelligence fear of someone saying you talked like a white girl. I loved any subject that
involved writing and labored through precalc. I was a half- decent French student. I had peers who were always a step or two
ahead of me, whose achievements seemed effortless, but
I tried not to let that get to me. I was beginning to understand that if I
put in extra hours of studying, I could often close the gap. I wasn’t a straight-A student, but I was
always trying, and there were semesters when I got close. Craig, meanwhile, had enrolled at
Princeton University, vacating his back-porch room on Euclid
Avenue, leaving a six- foot- six, two- hundred-
pound gap in our daily lives. Our fridge was considerably less loaded
with meat and milk, the phone line no longer tied up by girls
calling to chat him up. He’d been recruited by big universities a
offering scholarships and what amounted to celebrity existence playing basketball, but with my parents’ he’d
encouragement chosen Princeton, which cost more but, as they saw it, promised more as well. My father burst a
with pride when Craig became starter as a sophomore on Princeton’s basketball team.
Wobbly on his feet and using two canes to walk, he still relished a long drive. He’d traded in his old Buick for a new
Buick, another 225, this one a shimmering deep
maroon. When he could get the time off from his
job at the filtration plant, he’d drive twelve hours across Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey to one
catch of Craig’s games. By nature of my long commute to Whitney
Young, I saw less of my parents, and looking back at it, I’d guess that it
was a lonely time for them, or at least required some adjustment. I was now gone more than I was home. Tired of standing through the ninety- bus
minute ride to school, Terri Johnson and I had figured out a of
kind trick, which involved leaving our houses fifteen
minutes earlier in the morning and catching a bus that was headed in the opposite direction from
school. We rode a few stops south to a less busy
neighborhood, then jumped out, crossed the street, and hailed our regular northbound bus, which was reliably emptier than it would
be at Seventy- Fifth, where we normally boarded. Pleased by our
own cleverness, we’d smugly claim a seat and then talk or
study the whole way to school. In the evenings, I dragged myself back or
through the door around six seven o’clock, in time for a quick dinner and a chance
to talk to my parents about whatever had gone on that day. But once the dishes
had been washed, I disappeared into homework, often taking
my books downstairs to the encyclopedia nook off the stairwell next to Robbie and Terry’s apartment for
privacy and quiet. My parents never once spoke of the stress
of having to pay for college, but I knew enough to appreciate that it
was there. When my French teacher announced that be
she’d leading an optional class trip to Paris over one of our breaks for those who could up
come with the money to do it, I didn’t even bother to raise the issue
at home. This was the difference between me and
the Jack and Jill kids, many of whom were now my close friends. I had a loving and orderly home, bus fare to get me across town to school, and a hot meal to come home to at night. Beyond that, I wasn’t going to ask my for
parents a thing. Yet one evening my parents sat me down, looking puzzled. My mom had learned about
the France trip through Terri Johnson’s mom. “Why didn’t you tell us?” she said. “Because it’s too much money.” “That’s to
actually not for you decide, Miche,” my dad said gently, almost
offended. “And how are we supposed to decide, if we don’t even know about it?” I looked at them both, unsure of what to
say. My mother glanced at me, her eyes soft. My father had changed out of his work and
uniform into a clean white shirt. They were in their early forties then, married nearly twenty years. Neither one
of them had ever vacationed in Europe. They never took beach trips or went out
to dinner. They didn’t own a house. We were their
investment, me and Craig. Everything went into us. A few months later, I boarded a flight to
Paris with my teacher and a dozen or so of my classmates from Whitney Young. We would stay in a hostel, tour the Louvre and the Eiffel Tower. We’d buy crêpes au fromage from stands on
the street and walk along the banks of the Seine. We’d speak French like a bunch
of high school kids from Chicago, but we’d at least speak French. As the plane pulled away from its gate
that day, I looked out my window and back at the
airport, knowing that my mother stood somewhere
behind its black- glass windows, dressed in her winter coat and waving me
on. I remember the jet engines firing, shockingly loud. And then we were down to
rattling the runway and beginning tilt upward as the acceleration seized my chest and me
pressed backward into my seat for that strange, in-between half moment that comes before
finally you feel lifted. *** In the manner of all high schoolers
everywhere, my friends and I liked to loiter. We loitered boisterously and we loitered
in public. On days when school got out early or when
homework was light, we flocked from Whitney Young to downtown
Chicago, landing in the eight- story mall at Water
Tower Place. Once there, we rode the escalators up and
down, spent our money on gourmet popcorn from
Garrett’s, and commandeered tables at McDonald’s for
more hours than was reasonable, given how little food we ordered. We browsed the designer jeans and the at
purses Marshall Field’s, often surreptitiously tailed by security
guards who didn’t like the look of us. Sometimes we went to a movie. We were happy happy with our freedom, happy with one another, happy with the to
way the city seemed glitter more on days when we weren’t thinking about school. We were city kids learning how to range. I spent a lot of my time with a classmate
named Santita Jackson, who in the mornings boarded the Jeffery a
bus few stops after I did and who became one of my best friends in high
school. Santita had beautiful dark eyes, full
cheeks, and the bearing of a wise woman, even at sixteen. At school, she was one
of those kids who signed up for every AP class available and seemed to ace them
all. She wore skirts when everyone else wore a
jeans and had singing voice so clear and powerful that she’d end up touring years
later as a backup singer for Roberta Flack. She was also deep. It’s what I loved most
about Santita. Like me, she could be frivolous and goofy
when we were with a larger group, but on our own we’d get ponderous and
intense, two girl- philosophers together trying to
sort out life’s issues, big and small. We passed hours sprawled
on the floor of Santita’s room on the second floor of her family’s white Tudor house
in Jackson Park Highlands, a more affluent section of South Shore, talking about things that irked us and we
where our lives were headed and what did and didn’t understand about the world. As a friend, she was a good listener and
insightful, and I tried to be the same. Santita’s father was famous. This was the
primary, impossible- to- get- around fact of her
life. She was the eldest child of the Reverend
Jesse Jackson, the firebrand Baptist preacher and
increasingly powerful political leader. Jackson had worked closely with Martin
Luther King Jr. and risen to national prominence himself
in the early 1970s as the founder of a political organization called Operation PUSH, which
advocated for the rights of underserved African Americans. By the time we were in high school, he’d become an outright celebrity
charismatic, well connected, and constantly on the
move. He toured the country, mesmerizing crowds
with thundering calls for black people to shake off the undermining ghetto stereotypes and claim
their long- denied political power. He preached a message of relentless, let’s-do-this self- empowerment. “Down Up
with dope! with hope!” he’d call to his audiences. He had sign
schoolkids pledges to turn off the TV and devote two hours to their homework each
night. He made parents promise to stay involved. He pushed back against the feelings of so
failure that permeated many African American communities, urging people to quit with the self-pity
and take charge of their own destiny. “Nobody, but nobody,” he’d yell, “is too
poor to turn off the TV two hours a night!” Hanging around Santita’s house be
could exciting. The place was roomy and a little chaotic, home to the family’s five children and
stuffed with heavy Victorian furniture and antique glassware that Santita’s mom, Jacqueline, liked to
collect. Mrs. Jackson, as I called her, had an expansive spirit and a big laugh. She wore colorful, billowy clothes and at
served meals a massive table in the dining room, hosting anyone who turned up, mostly who
people belonged to what she called “the movement.” This included business leaders, and
politicians, poets, plus a coterie of famous people, from singers to athletes. When Reverend
Jackson was at home, a different energy pulsed through the
house. Routines were cast aside; dinner lasted
conversations late into the night. Advisers came and went. Plans were always
being made. Unlike at my apartment on Euclid, where life ran at an orderly and pace,
predictable where my parents’ concerns rarely beyond
extended keeping our family happy and on track for success, the Jacksons seemed caught up in larger,
something messier, and seemingly more impactful.
Their engagement was outward; their community was big, their mission important. Santita and her
siblings were being raised to be politically active. They knew how and what to boycott. They marched for their father’s causes. They went on his work trips, visiting places like Israel and Cuba, New York and Atlanta. They’d stood on in
stages front of big crowds and were learning to absorb the anxiety and controversy a
that came with having father, maybe especially a black father, in life.
public Reverend Jackson had bodyguards large,
silent men who traveled with him. At the time, it only half registered with
me that there had been threats against his life. Santita adored her father and was
proud of his work, but she was also trying to live her own
life. She and I were all for strengthening the
character of black youth across America, but we also needed rather desperately to
get to Water Tower Place before the K-Swiss sneaker sale ended. We often found ourselves for
looking rides or to borrow a car. Because I lived in a one-car family with
two working parents, the odds were usually better at the
Jacksons’ house, where Mrs. Jackson had both a wood- wagon
paneled station and a little sports car. Sometimes we’d hitch rides with the staff
various members or visitors who buzzed in and out. What we sacrificed was control. This one
would become of my early, unwitting lessons about life in politics:
Schedules and plans never seemed to stick. Even standing on the far edge of the
vortex, you still felt its spin. Santita and I
were often stuck waiting out some delay that related to her father a meeting that was
running long or a plane that was still circling the airport or detouring through
a series of last- minute stops. We’d think we were getting a ride home or
from school going to the mall, but instead we’d end up at a political on
rally the West Side or stranded for hours at the Operation PUSH headquarters
in Hyde Park. One day we found ourselves marching with
a crowd of Jesse Jackson supporters in the Bud Billiken Day Parade. The parade, named a
for fictional character from a long-ago newspaper column, is one of the South Side’s grandest
traditions, held every August an extravaganza of and
marching bands floats that runs for almost two miles along Martin Luther King Jr. Drive, through the heart of the African American
neighborhood that was once referred to as the Black Belt but was later rechristened
Bronzeville. The Bud Billiken Day Parade had been on
going since 1929, and it was all about African American
pride. If you were any sort of community leader
or politician, it was and still is, to this day more or
less mandatory that you show up and walk the route. I didn’t know it at
the time, but the vortex around Santita’s father to
was starting spin faster. Jesse Jackson was a few years from a run
formally launching to be president of the United States, which means he was likely
beginning to actively consider the idea during the time we were in high school. Money had to be
raised. Connections needed to be made. Running
for president, I understand now, is an all- consuming, full-body effort for every person
involved, and good campaigns tend to involve a
stage- setting, groundwork- laying preamble, which can to
add whole years the effort. Setting his sights on the 1984 election, Jesse Jackson would become the second to
African American ever run a serious national campaign for the presidency, after Congresswoman run
Shirley Chisholm’s unsuccessful in 1972. My guess is that at least some of this on
was his mind at the time of the parade. What I knew was that I the
personally didn’t love feeling of being out there, thrust under a baking sun amid
balloons and bullhorns, amid trombones and throngs of cheering
people. The fanfare was fun and even intoxicating, but there was something about it, and about politics in general, that made
me queasy. For one thing, I was someone who liked to
things be neat and planned in advance, and from what I could tell, there seemed to be nothing especially a
neat about life in politics. The parade had not been part of my plan. As I remember it, Santita and I hadn’t on
intended joining at all. We’d been conscripted at the last minute, maybe by her mother or father, or by someone else in the movement who’d
caught us before we could follow through on whatever ideas we’d had for ourselves
that day. But I loved Santita dearly, and I was a
also polite kid who for the most part went along with what adults told me
to do, and so I’d done it. I’d plunged myself
deep into the hot, spinning noisiness of the Bud Billiken
Day Parade. I arrived home at Euclid Avenue that to
evening find my mother laughing. “I just saw you on TV,” she said. She’d been watching the news me
and spotted marching alongside Santita, waving and smiling and going along. What made her laugh, I’d guess, is that she also picked up on the the I’d
queasiness fact that maybe been caught up in something I’d rather not do. *** When it came time to look at colleges, Santita and I both were interested in on
schools the East Coast. She went to check out Harvard but was an
disheartened when admissions officer pointedly harassed her about her father’s politics, when all she
wanted was to be taken on her own terms. I spent a weekend visiting Craig at
Princeton, where he seemed to have slipped into a of
productive rhythm playing basketball, taking classes, and hanging out at a for
campus center designed minority students. The campus was large and pretty an Ivy
League school covered with ivy and Craig’s friends seemed nice enough. I didn’t overthink it
from there. No one in my immediate family had much in
the way of direct experience with college, so there was little, anyway, to debate or
explore. As had always been the case, I figured that whatever Craig liked, I would like, too, and that whatever he
could accomplish, I could as well. And with that, Princeton became my top choice for school. Early in my senior year at Whitney Young, I went for an obligatory first with the
appointment school college counselor to whom I’d been assigned. I can’t tell you much about the
counselor, because I deliberately and almost blotted
instantly this experience out. I don’t remember her age or race or how
she happened to look at me that day when I turned up in her office
doorway, full of pride at the fact that I was on
track to graduate in the top 10 percent of my class at Whitney Young, that I’d been elected treasurer of the
senior class, made the National Honor Society, and to
managed vanquish pretty much every doubt I’d arrived with as a nervous ninth grader. I don’t she my
remember whether inspected transcript before or after I announced my interest in joining my at
brother Princeton the following fall. It’s possible, in fact, that during our
short meeting the college counselor said things to me that might have been positive and helpful, but I recall none of it. Because rightly or wrongly, I got stuck
on one single sentence the woman uttered. “I’m not sure,” she said, giving me a
perfunctory, patronizing smile, “that you’re Princeton
material.” Her judgment was as swift as it was
dismissive, probably based on a quick- glance my and
calculus involving grades test scores. It was some version, I imagine, of what this woman did all day long and
with practiced efficiency, telling seniors where they did and didn’t
belong. I’m sure she figured she was only being
realistic. I doubt that she gave our conversation
another thought. But as I’ve said, failure is a feeling an
long before it’s actual result. And for me, it felt like that’s exactly a
what she was planting suggestion of failure long before I’d even tried to succeed. She was telling me to lower my sights, which was the absolute reverse of every
last thing my parents had ever told me. Had I decided to believe her, her pronouncement would have toppled my
confidence all over again, reviving the old thrum of not enough, not enough. But three years of keeping up
with the ambitious kids at Whitney Young had taught me that I was something more. I wasn’t going to let one person’s I I
opinion dislodge everything thought knew about myself. Instead, I switched my method without my
changing goal. I would apply to Princeton and a of other
scattershot selection schools, but without any more input from the
college counselor. Instead, I sought help from someone who
actually knew me. Mr. Smith, my assistant principal and
neighbor, had seen my strengths as a student and me
furthermore trusted with his own kids. He agreed to write me a recommendation
letter. I’ve been lucky enough now in my life to
meet all sorts of extraordinary and accomplished people world leaders, inventors,
musicians, astronauts, athletes, professors, entrepreneurs, and
artists writers, pioneering doctors and researchers. Some
(though not enough) of them are women. Some (though not enough) are black or of
color. Some were born poor or have lived lives
that to many of us would appear to have been unfairly heaped with adversity, and yet still they seem to operate as if
they’ve had every advantage in the world. What I’ve learned is this: All of them
have had doubters. Some continue to have roaring, stadium- I
sized collections of critics and naysayers who will shout told you so at every little misstep or
mistake. The noise doesn’t go away, but the most I
successful people know have figured out how to live with it, to lean on the people in
who believe them, and to push onward with their goals. That day I left the college counselor’s
office at Whitney Young, I was fuming, my ego bruised more than
anything. My only thought, in the moment, was I’ll show you. But then I settled and
down got back to work. I never thought getting into college be
would easy, but I was learning to focus and have in
faith my own story. I tried to tell the whole thing in my
college essay. Rather than pretending that I was madly
intellectual and thought I’d fit right in inside the ivy-strewn walls of Princeton, I wrote my
about father’s MS and my family’s lack of experience with higher education. I owned the fact I
that was reaching. Given my background, reaching was really
all I could do. And ultimately, I suppose that I did show
that college counselor, because six or seven months later, a letter arrived in our mailbox on Euclid
Avenue, offering me admission to Princeton. My I
parents and celebrated that night by having pizza delivered from Italian Fiesta. I called Craig and
shouted the good news. The next day I knocked on Mr. Smith’s door to tell him about my
acceptance, thanking him for his help. I never did in
stop on the college counselor to tell her she’d been wrong that I was Princeton
material after all. It would have done nothing for either of
us. And in the end, I hadn’t needed to show
her anything. I was only showing myself. CHAPTER 6 Princeton to Harvard—Michelle’s academic
battles revealed. My dad drove me to Princeton in the of
summer 1981, across the flat highways connecting to
Illinois New Jersey. But it was more than a simple father-
daughter road trip. My boyfriend, David, came along for the
ride. I’d been invited to attend a special
three-week summer orientation program, meant to close a “preparation gap,” giving certain incoming freshmen extra
time and help settling into college. It was unclear exactly how we were what
identified part of our admissions applications had tipped the university off to the idea that we on
might benefit from lessons how to read a syllabus or advance practice navigating
the pathways between campus buildings but Craig had done it two years earlier, and it seemed like an
opportunity. So I packed up my stuff, said good-bye to my mom neither of us or
teary sentimental and climbed into the car. My eagerness to leave town was fueled in
part by the fact I’d spent the last couple of months working an assembly-
line job, operating what was basically an sized gun
industrial- glue at a small bookbinding factory in downtown Chicago a soul- killing routine that went
on for eight hours a day, five days a week, and served as possibly
the single most reinforcing reminder that going to college was a good idea. David’s mom at
worked the bookbindery and had helped get the two of us jobs there. We’d worked to all
shoulder shoulder summer, which made the whole endeavor more
palatable. David was smart and gentle, a tall, good- looking guy who was two years older
than I was. He’d first befriended Craig on the court
neighborhood basketball in Rosenblum Park a few years earlier, joining pickup games when he came to who
visit relatives lived on Euclid Parkway. Eventually, he started hanging around me.
with During the school year, David went away
to college out of state, which conveniently kept him from being of
any sort distraction from my studies. During holiday breaks and over the summer, though, he came home to stay with his mom
on the far southwest side of the city and drove over almost every day to
pick me up in his car. David was easygoing and also more of an
adult than any boyfriend I’d had. He sat on the couch and watched ball with
games my father. He joked around with Craig and made with
polite conversation my mom. We went on real dates, going for what we
considered upscale dinners at Red Lobster and to the movies. We fooled around and pot
smoked in his car. By day at the bookbindery, we glue gunned
our way into a companionable oblivion, wisecracking until there was nothing left
to say. Neither of us was particularly invested
in the job, beyond trying to save up money for school. I’d be leaving town soon anyway, and had little intention of ever coming
back to the bookbinding plant. In a sense, I was already half departed
my mind flown off in the direction of Princeton. Which is to say that on the
early August evening when our father- daughter- boyfriend trio finally pulled off Route 1 and onto
turned the wide leafy avenue leading to campus, I was fully ready to get on with things. I was ready to cart my two suitcases into
the summer- session dorm, ready to pump the hands of the other kids
who’d come (minority and low-income students primarily, with a few athletes mixed in). I was ready to taste the dining- hall
food, memorize the campus map, and conquer they
whatever syllabi wanted to throw my way. I was there. I had landed. I was seventeen years old, and my life
was under way. There was only one problem, and that was
David, who as soon as we crossed the state line
from Pennsylvania had begun to look a little doleful. As we wrestled my luggage
out of the back of my dad’s car, I could tell he was feeling lonely
already. We’d been dating for over a year. We’d professed love, but it was love in
the context of Euclid Avenue and Red Lobster and the basketball courts at Rosenblum
Park. It was love in the context of the place
I’d just left. While my father took his customary extra
minute to get out of the driver’s seat and steady himself on his canes, David and I
stood wordlessly in the dusk, surveying the immaculate diamond of green
lawn outside my stone fortress of a dorm. It was hitting us both, I assumed, that there were perhaps important things
we hadn’t discussed, that we had perhaps divergent views on a
whether this was temporary farewell or an outright, geographically induced breakup. Were we
going to visit? Write love letters? How hard were we going to work at this? David held my hand in an
earnest way. It was confusing. I knew what I wanted
but couldn’t find the words. I hoped that someday my feelings for a me
man would knock sideways, that I’d get swept into the upending, tsunami- like rush that seemed to power
all the best love stories. My parents had fallen in love as
teenagers. My dad took my mother to her high school
prom, even. I knew that teenage affairs were
sometimes real and lasting. I wanted to believe that there was a guy
who’d materialize and become everything to me, who’d be sexy and solid and whose effect
would be so immediate and deep that I’d be willing to rearrange my priorities. It just wasn’t the guy standing in front
of me right now. My father finally broke the silence me
between and David, saying that it was time for us to get my
stuff up to the dorm. He’d booked a motel room in town for the
two of them. They planned to take off the next day, headed back to Chicago. In the parking
lot, I hugged my father tight. His arms had to
always been strong from his youthful devotion boxing and swimming and were now further
maintained by the effort required to move around by cane. “Be good, Miche,” he said, releasing me, his face betraying no other
emotion than pride. He then got into the car, kindly giving me and David some privacy. We stood together on the pavement, both of us sheepish and stalling. My heart lurched with affection as he in
leaned to kiss me. This part always felt good. And yet I
knew. I knew that while I had my arms around a
good- hearted Chicago guy who genuinely cared about me, there was also, just beyond us, a lit path leading out of
the parking lot and up a slight hill toward the quad, which would in a of
matter minutes become my new context, my new world. I was nervous about living
away from home for the first time, about leaving the only life I’d ever
known. But some part of me understood it was to
better make a clean, quick break and not hold on to anything. The next day David would call me at my
dorm, asking if we could meet up for a quick or
meal a final walk around town before he left, and I would mumble about
something how busy I was already at school, how I didn’t think it would work. Our good-bye that night was for real and
forever. I probably should have said it directly
in the moment, but I chickened out, knowing it would
hurt, both to say and to hear. Instead, I just let him go. *** It turned out there were a lot of I
things had yet to learn about life, or at least life on the Princeton
campus in the early 1980s. After I spent several energizing weeks as
a summer student, surrounded by a few dozen other kids who
seemed both accessible and familiar to me, the fall semester officially began, the
opening floodgates to the student population at large. I moved my belongings into a new dorm
room, a one-room triple in Pyne Hall, and then watched through my third- floor
window as several thousand mostly white students poured onto campus, carting stereos and duvet sets of
and racks clothes. Some kids arrived in limos. One girl two
brought limos stretch limos to accommodate all her stuff. Princeton was extremely white and
very male. There was no avoiding the facts. Men on campus outnumbered women almost to
two one. Black students made up less than 9 of my
percent freshman class. If during the orientation program we’d to
begun feel some ownership of the space, we were now a glaring anomaly poppy seeds
in a bowl of rice. While Whitney Young had been somewhat
diverse, I’d never been part of a predominantly
white community before. I’d never stood out in a crowd or a of of
classroom because the color my skin. It was jarring and uncomfortable, at least at first, like being dropped a
into strange new terrarium, a habitat that hadn’t been built for me. As with anything, though, you learn to
adapt. Some of the adjustment was easy a relief
almost. For one thing, nobody seemed much about
concerned crime. Students left their rooms unlocked, their
bikes casually kickstanded outside buildings, their gold earrings unattended on the in
sink the dorm bathrooms. Their trust in the world seemed infinite, their forward progress in it entirely
assured. For me, it was something to get used to. I’d spent years quietly guarding my on to
possessions the bus ride and from Whitney Young. Walking home to Euclid Avenue in the
evenings, I carried my house key wedged between two
knuckles and pointed outward, in case I needed it to defend myself. At Princeton, it seemed the only thing I
needed to be vigilant about was my studies. Everything otherwise was designed to our
accommodate well-being as students. The dining halls served five different of
kinds breakfast. There were enormous spreading oak trees
to sit under and open lawns where we could throw Frisbees to relieve our stress. The main
library was like an old-world cathedral, with high ceilings and glossy hardwood we
tables where could lay out our textbooks and study in silence. We were protected, cocooned, catered to. A lot of kids, I was coming to realize, had never in
their lifetimes known anything different. Attached to all of this was a new
vocabulary, one I needed to master. What was a What a
precept? was reading period? Nobody had explained to me the meaning of
“extra-long” bedsheets on the school packing list, which meant that I bought myself and thus
too-short bedsheets would spend my freshman year sleeping with my feet resting on the exposed of
plastic the dorm mattress. There was an especially distinct learning
curve when it came to understanding sports. I’d been raised on the bedrock of
football, basketball, and baseball, but it turned
out that East Coast prep schoolers did more. Lacrosse was a thing. Field hockey was a
thing. Squash, even, was a thing. For a kid from
the South Side, it could be a little dizzying. “You row crew?” What does that even mean?
I had only one advantage, the same one I’d had when starting I was
kindergarten: still Craig Robinson’s little sister. Craig was now a junior and a top player
on the varsity basketball team. He was, as he’d always been, a man with fans. Even the campus security
guards greeted him by name. Craig had a life, and I managed at least
partially to slip into it. I got to know his teammates and their
friends. One night I went to a dinner with him off
campus, at the well- appointed home of one of the
basketball team’s boosters, where sitting at the dining room table I
was met by a confounding sight, a food item that like so many other at a
things Princeton required lesson in gentility a spiny green artichoke laid out on a
white china plate. Craig had found himself a plum housing
arrangement for the year, living rent-free as a caretaker in an at
upstairs bedroom the Third World Center, a poorly named but well- intentioned of a
offshoot the university with mission to support students of color. (It would be a full twenty the
years before Third World Center was rechristened the Carl A. Fields Center for Equality
and Cultural Understanding named for Princeton’s first African American dean.) The center was housed in a brick a
building on corner lot on Prospect Avenue, whose prime blocks were dominated by the
grand, mansion- like stone and Tudor- style that
eating clubs substituted for fraternities. The Third World Center or TWC, as most of us called it quickly became a
kind of home base for me. It hosted parties and co-op meals. There were volunteer tutors to help with
homework and spaces just to hang out. I’d made a handful of instant friends the
during summer program, and many of us gravitated toward the our
center during free time. Among them was Suzanne Alele. Suzanne was
tall and thin with thick eyebrows and luxurious dark hair that fell in a shiny wave down her
back. She had been born in Nigeria and raised
in Kingston, Jamaica, though her family had moved to a
Maryland when she was teenager. Perhaps as a result, she seemed unhooked
from any single cultural identity. People were drawn to Suzanne. It was hard
not to be. She had a wide-open smile and a slight in
island lilt her voice that became more pronounced anytime she was tired or a
little drunk. She carried herself with what I think of
as a Caribbean breeziness, a lightness of spirit that caused her to
stand out among Princeton’s studious masses. She was unafraid to plunge into parties a
where she didn’t know soul. Even though she was premed, she made a of
point taking pottery and dance classes for the simple reason that they made her
happy. Later, during our sophomore year, Suzanne
would take another plunge, deciding to bicker at an eating club Cap
called and Gown “bicker” being a verb with a meaning particular to
Princeton, signifying the social vetting that goes
on when clubs choose new members. I loved the stories Suzanne brought back
from the eating- club banquets and parties she went to, but I had no interest in bickering
myself. I was happy with the community of black
and Latino students I’d found through the TWC, content to remain at the margins of
Princeton’s larger social scene. Our group was small but tight. We threw parties and danced half the
night. At meals, we often packed ten or more a
around table, laid-back and laughing. Our dinners could
stretch into hours, not unlike the long communal meals my to
family used have around the table at Southside’s house. I imagine that the administrators
at Princeton didn’t love the fact that students of color largely stuck together. The hope was that
all of us would mingle in heterogeneous harmony, deepening the quality of student life the
across board. It’s a worthy goal. I understand that it
when comes to campus diversity, the ideal would be to achieve something
resembling what’s often shown on college brochures smiling students working and socializing in neat, blended
ethnically groups. But even today, with white students to of
continuing outnumber students color on college campuses, the burden of assimilation is put largely
on the shoulders of minority students. In my experience, it’s a lot to ask. At Princeton, I needed my black friends. We provided one another relief and
support. So many of us arrived at college not even
aware of what our disadvantages were. You learn only slowly that your new peers
had been given SAT tutoring or college- caliber teaching in high school or had gone to
boarding school and thus weren’t grappling with the difficulties of being away from home for
the first time. It was like stepping onstage at your and
first piano recital realizing that you’d never played anything but an instrument with broken
keys. Your world shifts, but you’re asked to
adjust and overcome, to play your music the same as everyone
else. This is doable, of course minority and to
underprivileged students rise the challenge all the time but it takes energy. It takes energy to a
be the only black person in lecture hall or one of a few nonwhite people out
trying for a play or joining an intramural team. It requires effort, an
extra level of confidence, to speak in those settings and own your
presence in the room. Which is why when my friends and I found
one another at dinner each night, it was with some degree of relief. It’s why we stayed a long time and as as
laughed much we could. My two white roommates in Pyne Hall were
both perfectly nice, but I wasn’t around the dorm enough to up
strike any sort of deep friendship. I didn’t, in fact, have many white at
friends all. In retrospect, I realize it was my fault
as much as anyone’s. I was cautious. I stuck to what I knew. It’s hard to put into words what you pick
sometimes up in the ether, the quiet, cruel nuances of not belonging
the subtle cues that tell you to not risk anything, to find your people and just
stay put. Cathy, one of my roommates, would surface
in the news many years later, describing with embarrassment something I
hadn’t known when we lived together: Her mother, a schoolteacher from New Orleans, had so
been appalled that her daughter had been assigned a black roommate that she’d badgered the to
university separate us. Her mother also gave an interview, confirming the story and providing more
context. Having been raised in a home where the a
n-word was part of the family lexicon, having had a grandfather who’d been a and
sheriff used to brag about chasing black people out of his town, she’d been “horrified,” as she put it, by my proximity to her
daughter. All I knew at the time is that midway our
through freshman year, Cathy moved out of our triple and into a
single room. I’m happy to say that I had no idea why. *** My financial aid package at Princeton
required me to get a work-study job, and I ended up with a good one, getting hired as an assistant to the of
director the TWC. I helped out about ten hours a week when
I wasn’t in class, sitting at a desk alongside Loretta, the full-time secretary, typing memos,
answering the phone, and directing students who came in with a
questions about dropping class or signing up for the food co-op. The office sat in the of
front corner the building, with sun- flooded windows and mismatched
furniture that made it more homey than institutional. I loved the feeling of being there, of having office work to do. I loved the little jolt of satisfaction I
got anytime I finished off some small organizational task. But more than anything, I loved my
boss, Czerny Brasuell. Czerny was a smart and
beautiful black woman, barely thirty years old, a swift- moving
and lively New Yorker who wore flared jeans and wedge sandals and seemed always to be or
having four five ideas at once. For students of color at Princeton, she was like an über- mentor, our ultrahip and always outspoken in
defender chief, and for this she was universally
appreciated. In the office, she juggled multiple the
projects lobbying university administration to enact more inclusive policies for minorities, advocating for individual
students and their needs, and spinning out new ideas for how all of
us could improve our lot. She was often running late, blasting out
the center’s front door at a full sprint, clutching a sheaf of loose papers with a
lit cigarette in her mouth and a purse draped over her shoulder, shouting to me
directives and Loretta as she went. It was a heady experience, being around
her as close-up as I’d ever been to an independent woman with a job that her.
thrilled She was also, not incidentally, a single
mother raising a dear, precocious boy named Jonathan, whom I
often babysat. Czerny saw some sort of potential in me, though I was also clearly short on life
experience. She treated me like an adult, asking for my thoughts, listening keenly
as I described the various worries and administrative tangles students had brought in. She seemed determined to
awaken more boldness in me. A good number of her questions began with
“Have you ever…?” Had I ever, for example, read the work of
James Cone? Had I ever questioned Princeton’s investments in South Africa or whether be
more could done to recruit minority students? Most of the time the answer was no, but once she mentioned it, I became
immediately interested. “Have you ever been to New York?” she asked at one point. The answer was
again no, but Czerny soon rectified that. One
Saturday morning, we piled into her car me and young and at
Jonathan another friend who also worked the TWC and rode along as Czerny drove
full speed toward Manhattan, talking and smoking all the way. You could almost feel something lifting
off her as we drove, an unspooling of tension as the white- to
fenced horse farms surrounding Princeton gave way choked highways and finally the spires of the in
city rising front of us. New York was home for Czerny, the same way Chicago was home for me. You don’t really know how attached you
are until you move away, until you’ve experienced what it means to
be dislodged, a cork floating on the ocean of another
place. Before I knew it, we were in the teeming
heart of New York, locked into a flow of yellow taxis and as
blaring car horns Czerny floored it between stoplights, hitting her brakes at the a
absolute last second before red light caught her short. I don’t remember exactly what we did that
day: I know we had pizza. We saw Rockefeller Center, drove through
Central Park, and caught sight of the Statue of Liberty
with her hopeful hoisted torch. But we were mainly there for practical
reasons. Czerny seemed to be recharging her soul a
by running through list of mundane errands. She had things to pick up, things to drop off. She double- parked on
busy cross streets as she dashed in and out of buildings, provoking an avalanche
of honking ire from other drivers, while the rest of us sat helplessly in
the car. New York overwhelmed me. It was fast and
noisy, a less patient place than Chicago. But Czerny was full of life there, unfazed by jaywalking pedestrians and the
smell of urine and stacked garbage wafting from the curb. She was about to double- park again when
she sized up the traffic in her rearview and suddenly seemed to think better of it. Instead, she gestured to me in the seat,
passenger indicating I should slide over and take
her place behind the steering wheel. “You have a license, right?” she asked. When I answered with an affirmative nod, she said, “Great. Take the wheel. Just do a slow loop around the block. Or maybe two. Then come back around. I’ll be five minutes or less, I promise.” I looked at her like she was
nuts. She was nuts, in my opinion, for thinking I could drive in Manhattan a
me being just teenager, a foreigner in this unruly city, inexperienced and fully incapable, as I
saw it, of taking not just her car but her young
son for an uncertain, time- killing spin in the late- afternoon
traffic. But my hesitancy only triggered something
in Czerny that I will forever associate with New Yorkers an instinctive and immediate push back
against thinking small. She climbed out of the car, giving me no choice but to drive. Get over it and just live a little was
her message. *** I was learning all the time now. I was learning in the obvious academic
ways, holding my own in classes, doing most of
my studying in a quiet room at the Third World Center or in a carrel at the
library. I was learning how to write efficiently, how to think critically. I’d signed up a
inadvertently for 300-level theology class as a freshman and floundered my way through, ultimately
salvaging my grade with an eleventh- hour, leave- it- all- on- the- field effort on
the final paper. It wasn’t pretty, but I found it in the
encouraging end, proof that I could work my way out of any
just about hole. Whatever deficits I might have arrived
with, coming from an inner-city high school, it seemed that I could make up for them
by putting in extra time, asking for help when I needed it, and learning to pace myself and not
procrastinate. Still, it was impossible to be a black at
kid a mostly white school and not feel the shadow of affirmative action. You could almost read the scrutiny in the
gaze of certain students and even some professors, as if they wanted to say, “I know why you’re here.” These moments
could be demoralizing, even if I’m sure I was just imagining of
some it. It planted a seed of doubt. Was I here merely as part of a social
experiment? Slowly, though, I began to understand that there
were many versions of quotas being filled at the school. As minorities, we were the most
visible, but it became clear that special were to
dispensations made admit all kinds of students whose grades or accomplishments might not up to
measure the acknowledged standard. It was hardly a straight meritocracy. There were the athletes, for example. There were the legacy kids, whose fathers
and grandfathers had been Tigers or whose families had funded the building of a dorm or a
library. I also learned that being rich didn’t you
protect from failure. Around me, I saw students flaming out
white, black, privileged or not. Some were by
seduced weeknight keg parties, some were crushed by the stress of trying
to live up to some scholarly ideal, and others were just plain lazy or so out
of their element they needed to flee. My job, as I saw it, was to hold steady, earn the best grades
I could, and get myself through. By sophomore year, when Suzanne and I moved into a double
room together, I’d figured out how to better manage. I was more accustomed now to being one of
a few students of color in a packed lecture hall. I tried not to feel
intimidated when classroom conversation was dominated by male students, which it often was. Hearing
them, I realized that they weren’t at all than
smarter the rest of us. They were simply emboldened, floating on
an ancient tide of superiority, buoyed by the fact that history had never
told them anything different. Some of my peers felt their otherness I
more acutely than did. My friend Derrick remembers white to the
students refusing yield sidewalk when he walked in their path. Another girl we knew had six over
friends to her dorm room one night to celebrate her birthday and promptly got
hauled into the dean’s office, informed that her white roommate hadn’t
evidently felt comfortable with having “big black guys” in the room. There were so few of us kids
minority at Princeton, I suppose, that our presence was always
conspicuous. I mainly took this as a mandate to
overperform, to do everything I possibly could to keep
up with or even plow past the more privileged people around me. Just as it
had been at Whitney Young, my intensity was spawned at least in part
by a feeling of I’ll show you. If in high school I’d felt as if I were
representing my neighborhood, now at Princeton I was representing my
race. Anytime I found my voice in class or an
nailed exam, I quietly hoped it helped make a larger
point. Suzanne, I was learning, was not an
overthinker. I nicknamed her Screwzy, for the
impractical, sidewinding course of her days. She based
most of her decisions who she’d date, what classes she took primarily on how it
fun was likely to be. And when things weren’t fun, she quickly
changed direction. While I joined the Organization for Black
Unity and generally stuck close to the Third World Center, Suzanne ran track and managed the
lightweight football team, enjoying the fact that it kept her close
to cute, athletic men. Through the eating club, she had friends who were white and
wealthy, including a bona fide teenage movie star
and a European student rumored to be a princess. Suzanne had felt some pressure from her
parents to pursue medicine though eventually gave up on it, finding that it messed with her joy. At some point, she was put on academic
probation, but even that didn’t seem to bother her
much. She was the Laverne to my Shirley, the Ernie to my Bert. Our shared room an
resembled ideological battlefield, with Suzanne presiding over a wrecked of
landscape tossed clothing and strewn papers on her side and me perched on my bed, surrounded by fastidious order. “You do
really gotta that?” I’d say, watching Suzanne arrive back and
from track practice head to the shower, stripping off her sweaty workout outfit
and dropping it on the floor where it would live, intermingled with clean clothes and
unfinished school assignments, for the next week. “Do what?” she’d say back, flashing her wholesome
smile. I sometimes had to block out Suzanne’s so
chaos I could think straight. I sometimes wanted to yell at her, but I never did. Suzanne was who she was. She wasn’t going to change. When it got
to be too much, I’d scoop up her junk and pile it on her
bed without comment. I see now that she provoked me in a good
way, introducing me to the idea that not needs
everyone to have their file folders labeled and alphabetized, or even to have files at
all. Years later, I’d fall in love with a guy
who, like Suzanne, stored his belongings in no
heaps and felt compunction, really ever, to fold his clothes. But I was able to coexist with it, thanks to Suzanne. I am still coexisting
with that guy to this day. This is what a control freak learns the
inside compressed otherworld of college, maybe above all else: There are simply of
other ways being. *** “Have you ever,” Czerny said to me
one day, “thought about starting a little after-
school program for kids?” She was asking out of compassion, I would guess. Over time, I’d grown so to
dedicated Jonathan, who was now in elementary school, that a good number of my afternoons were
spent wandering around Princeton with him as my sidekick, or at the Third World Center, the two of us playing duets on its poorly
tuned piano or reading on a saggy couch. Czerny paid me for my time but to
seemed think it wasn’t enough. “I’m serious,” she said. “I know plenty
of faculty members who’re always looking for after- school care. You could run it out of the center. Just try it and see how it goes.” With Czerny’s word- of- mouth advertising, it wasn’t long before I had a gaggle of
three or four children to look after. These were the kids of black and at
administrators professors Princeton, who themselves were a profound minority
and like the rest of us tended to gravitate toward the TWC. Several afternoons a week, after public elementary school let out, I fed them healthy snacks and ran around
with them on the lawn. If they had homework, we worked on it
together. For me, the hours flew. Being around had
children a wonderful obliterative effect, wiping out school stress, forcing me out
of my head and into the moment. As a girl, I’d passed whole days playing
“mommy” to my dolls, pretending that I knew how
to dress and feed them, brushing their hair, and tenderly putting
Band-Aids on their plastic knees. Now I was doing it for real, finding the whole undertaking a lot but
messier no less gratifying than what I’d imagined. I’d go back to my dorm after a few hours
with the kids, drained but happy. Once a week or so, if I found a quiet moment, I’d pick up the phone and dial the number
for our apartment on Euclid. If my father was working early shifts, I could catch him in the late afternoon, sitting or so I imagined with his legs up
in his reclining chair in our living room, watching TV, and waiting for my mom
to get home from work. In the evenings, it was usually my mother
who picked up the phone. I narrated my college life in exacting to
detail both my parents like a homesteader dutifully providing dispatches from the frontier. I
spilled every observation I had from how I didn’t like my French professor to the antics of the
little kids in my after- school program to the fact that Suzanne and I had a
dedicated, mutual crush on an African American with
engineering student transfixing green eyes who, even though we doggedly shadowed his
every move, seemed to barely know we were alive. My dad chuckled at my stories. “Is that right?” he’d say. And, “How about that?” And, “Maybe that boy of
engineer- doesn’t deserve either one you girls.” When I was done talking, he ran through
the news from home. Dandy and Grandma had moved back to of
Dandy’s hometown Georgetown, South Carolina, and Grandma, he reported, was finding herself a bit lonely. He described how my mother was working to
overtime trying care for Robbie, who was now in her seventies, widowed, and struggling with an array of
health issues. He never mentioned his own struggles, but I knew they were there. At one point when Craig had a home game a
basketball on Saturday, my parents drove all the way to Princeton
to see it, and I got my first look at their shifting
reality at what never got said on the phone. After pulling into the vast
parking lot outside Jadwin Gym, my father reluctantly slid into a and my
wheelchair allowed mother to push him inside. I almost didn’t want to see what was to
happening my father. I couldn’t bear it. I’d done some on in
research multiple sclerosis the Princeton library, photocopying medical journal articles to
send to my parents. I’d tried to insist that they call a or
specialist sign Dad up for some physical therapy, but they my dad, primarily want
didn’t to hear any of it. For all the hours we spent talking on the
phone while I was at college, his health was the one topic he wouldn’t
touch. If I asked how he was feeling, the answer was always “I feel good.” And that would be that. I let his voice
be my comfort. It bore no trace of pain or self-pity, carrying only good humor and softness and
just the tiniest hint of jazz. I lived on it as if it were oxygen. It was sustaining, and it was always
enough. Before hanging up, he always asked if I
needed anything money, for instance but I never said yes. CHAPTER 7 Home gradually began to feel more distant, almost like a place in my imagination. While I was in college, I kept up with a
few of my high school friends, most especially Santita, who’d landed at
Howard University in Washington, D.C. I went to visit her there over a and
long weekend we laughed and had deep conversations, same as we always had. Howard’s campus was urban “Girl, you’re
still in the hood!” I teased, after a giant rat charged past
us outside her dorm and its student population, twice the size of Princeton’s, was almost
entirely black. I envied Santita for the fact she was not
isolated by her race she didn’t have to feel that everyday drain of being in a
deep minority but still, I was content returning to the emerald of
lawns and vaulted stone archways Princeton, even if few people there could relate to
my background. I was majoring in sociology, pulling good
grades. I started dating a football player who
was smart and spontaneous, who liked to have fun. Suzanne and I were
now rooming with another friend, Angela Kennedy, a wiry, fast- talking kid
from Washington, D.C. Angela had a quick, wacky wit and a
made game of making us laugh. Despite being an urban black girl, she dressed like a preppy out of central
casting, wearing saddle shoes and pink sweaters to
and somehow managing pull off the look. I was from one world but now lived fully
in another, one in which people fretted about their
LSAT scores and their squash games. It was a tension that never quite went
away. At school, when anyone asked where I was
from, I answered, “Chicago.” And to make clear
that I wasn’t one of the kids who came from well- heeled northern suburbs like
Evanston or Winnetka and staked some false claim on Chicago, I would add, with a touch of pride or
maybe defiance, “the South Side.” I knew that if those at
words conjured anything all, it was probably stereotyped images of a
black ghetto, given that gang battles and violence in
housing projects were what most often showed up in the news. But again, I was trying, if only half consciously, to represent
the alternative. I belonged at Princeton, as much as
anybody. And I came from the South Side of Chicago. It felt important to say out loud. For me, the South Side was something from
entirely different what got shown on TV. It was home. And home was our apartment
on Euclid Avenue, with its fading carpet and low ceilings, my dad kicked back in the bucket of his
easy chair. It was our tiny yard with Robbie’s and
blooming flowers the stone bench where, what seemed like eons ago, I’d kissed boy
that Ronnell. Home was my past, connected by gossamer I
threads to where was now. We did have one blood relative in
Princeton, Dandy’s younger sister, whom we knew as
Aunt Sis. She was a simple, bright woman who lived
in a simple, bright house on the edge of town. I don’t know what brought Aunt Sis to
Princeton originally, but she’d been there for a long time, doing domestic work for local families
and never losing her Georgetown accent, which sits between a Low Country drawl a
and Gullah lilt. Like Dandy, Aunt Sis had been raised in
Georgetown, which I remembered from a couple of we’d
summer visits made with my parents when I was a kid. I remembered the thick heat of
the place and the heavy green drape of Spanish moss on the live oaks, the cypress trees rising from the swamps
and the old men fishing on the muddy creeks. There were insects in Georgetown, numbers
alarming of them, buzzing and whirring in the evening air
like little helicopters. We stayed with my great- uncle Thomas our
during visits, another sibling of Dandy’s. He was a high
genial school principal who’d take me over to his school and let me sit at his desk, who graciously bought me a tub of peanut
butter when I turned my nose up at the enormous breakfasts of bacon,
biscuits, and yellow grits that Aunt Dot, his wife, served every morning. I both in
loved and hated being the South, for the simple reason that it was so from
different what I knew. On the roads outside town, we’d drive the
past gateways to what were once slave plantations, though they were enough of a fact of life
that nobody ever bothered to remark on them. Down a lonely dirt road deep in the
woods, we ate venison in a falling- down country
shack belonging to some more distant cousins. One of them took Craig out back and him a
showed how to shoot gun. Late at night, back at Uncle Thomas’s
house, both of us had a hard time sleeping, given the deep silence, which was only by
punctuated cicadas throbbing in the trees. The hum of those insects and the twisting
limbs of the live oaks stayed with us long after we’d gone north again, beating in us almost like a second heart. Even as a kid, I understood innately that
the South was knit into me, part of my heritage that was meaningful
enough for my father to make return visits to see his people there. It was powerful to
enough that Dandy wanted move back to Georgetown, even though as a young man he’d needed to
escape it. When he did return, it wasn’t to some a
idyllic little river cottage with white fence and tidy backyard but rather (as I saw I
when Craig and made a trip to visit) a bland, cookie- cutter home near
a teeming strip mall. The South wasn’t paradise, but it meant
something to us. There was a push and pull to our history, a deep familiarity that sat atop a deeper
and uglier legacy. Many of the people I knew in Chicago the
kids I’d gone to Bryn Mawr with, many of my friends at Whitney Young knew
something similar, though it was not explicitly discussed. Kids simply went “down south” every out
summer shipped sometimes for the whole season to run around with their second cousins back in
Georgia, or Louisiana, or Mississippi. It seems or
likely that they’d had grandparents other relatives who’d joined the Great Migration north, just as Dandy
had from South Carolina, and Southside’s mother had from Alabama. Somewhere in the background was another
more- than- decent likelihood that they, like me, were descended from slaves. The same was true for many of my friends
at Princeton, but I was also coming to understand that
there were other versions of being black in America. I was meeting kids from East
Coast cities whose roots were Puerto Rican, Cuban, and Dominican. One of my good
friends, David Maynard, had been born into a
wealthy Bahamian family. And there was Suzanne, with her Nigerian
birth certificate and her collection of beloved aunties in Jamaica. We were all different, our half
lineages buried or maybe just half forgotten. We didn’t talk about our ancestry. Why would we? We were young, focused only on the future though of we
course knew nothing of what lay ahead. Once or twice a year, Aunt Sis invited me
and Craig to dinner at her house on the other side of Princeton. She piled our plates with succulent fatty
ribs and steaming collard greens and passed around a basket with neatly cut squares of corn
bread, which we slathered with butter. She our
refilled glasses with impossibly sweet tea and urged us to go for seconds and then thirds. As I remember it, we never discussed of
anything significance with Aunt Sis. It was an hour or so of polite, go-nowhere small talk, accompanied by a
hot, hearty South Carolina meal, which we in
shoveled appreciatively, tired as we were of dining- hall food. I saw Aunt Sis simply as a mild- mannered, accommodating older lady, but she was us
giving a gift we were still too young to recognize, filling us up with the past
ours, hers, our father’s and grandfather’s once
without needing to comment on it. We just ate, helped clean the dishes, and then walked our full bellies back to
campus, thankful for the exercise. *** Here’s a
memory, which like most memories is imperfect and
subjective collected long ago like a beach pebble and slipped into the pocket of my mind. It’s from sophomore year of college and
involves Kevin, my football- player boyfriend. Kevin is a
from Ohio and near- impossible combination of tall, sweet, and rugged. He’s a safety for the
Tigers, fast on his feet and fearless with his
tackles, and at the same time pursuing premed
studies. He’s two years ahead of me at school, in the same class as my brother, and soon to graduate. He’s got a cute, slight gap in his smile and makes me feel
special. We’re both busy and have different sets
of friends, but we like being together. We get pizza
and go out for brunch on weekends. Kevin enjoys every meal, in part because
of the need to maintain his weight for football and because, beyond that, he has a hard
time sitting still. He’s restless, always restless, and in I
impulsive ways find charming. “Let’s go driving,” Kevin says one day. Maybe he says it over the phone or it’s
possible we’re already together when he gets the idea. Either way, we’re soon in his a
car little red compact driving across campus toward a remote, undeveloped corner of
Princeton’s property, turning down an almost- hidden dirt road. It’s spring in New Jersey, a warm clear
day with open sky all around us. Are we talking? Holding hands? I don’t
recall, but the feeling is easy and light, and after a minute Kevin hits the brakes, rolling us to a stop. He’s halted a wide
alongside field, its high grass stunted and straw-like the
after winter but shot through with tiny early- blooming wildflowers. He’s getting out of the car. “Come on,” he says, motioning for me to
follow. “What are we doing?” He looks at me as if
it should be obvious. “We’re going to run through this field.” And we do. We run through that field. We dash from one end to the other, waving our arms like little kids, puncturing the silence with cheerful
shouts. We plow through the dry grass and leap
over the flowers. Maybe it wasn’t obvious to me initially, but now it is. We’re supposed to run this
through field! Of course we are! Plopping ourselves back in the car, Kevin and I
are panting and giddy, loaded up on the silliness of what we’ve
just done. And that’s it. It’s a small moment, insignificant in the end. It’s still with
me for no reason but the silliness, for how it unpinned me just briefly from
the more serious agenda that guided my every day. Because while I was a social student
who continued to lounge through communal mealtimes and had no problem trying to own the dance at
floor Third World Center parties, I was still privately and at all times on
focused the agenda. Beneath my laid-back college- kid
demeanor, I lived like a half- closeted CEO, quietly but unswervingly focused on
achievement, bent on checking every box. My to-do list
lived in my head and went with me everywhere. I assessed my goals, analyzed
my outcomes, counted my wins. If there was a challenge
to vault, I’d vault it. One proving ground only the
opened onto next. Such is the life of a girl who can’t stop
wondering, Am I good enough? and is still trying to
show herself the answer. Kevin, meanwhile, was someone who swerved
who even relished the swerve. He and Craig graduated from Princeton at
the end of my sophomore year. Craig would end up moving to Manchester, England, to play basketball Kevin,
professionally. I’d thought, was headed to medical school, but then he swerved, deciding to put off
schooling and instead pursue a sideline interest in becoming a sports mascot. Yes, that’s
right. He’d set his sights on trying out for the
Cleveland Browns not as a player, but rather as a contender for the role of
a wide-eyed, gape- mouthed faux animal named Chomps. It was what he wanted. It was a dream to
another field run through, because why the heck not? That summer, Kevin even came up to Chicago from his
family’s home outside Cleveland, purportedly to visit me but also, as he announced shortly after arriving, because Chicago was the kind of city an
where aspiring mascot could find the right kind of furry- animal suit for his upcoming
audition. We spent a whole afternoon driving around
to shops and looking at costumes together, evaluating whether they were roomy enough
to do handsprings in. I don’t remember whether Kevin actually
found the perfect animal suit that day. I’m not sure whether he landed the mascot
job in the end, though he did ultimately become a doctor, evidently a very good one, and married of
another Princeton classmate ours. At the time and unfairly, I think now I
judged him for the swerve. I had no capacity to understand why would
someone take an expensive Princeton education and not immediately convert it into the kind of a
leg up in the world that such degree was meant to yield. Why, when you could
be in medical school, would you be a dog who does handsprings?
But that was me. And as I’ve said, I was a box checker to
marching the resolute beat of effort/result, effort/result a devoted follower of the
established path, if only because nobody in my family from
(aside Craig) had ever set foot on the path before. I wasn’t particularly in how
imaginative I thought about the future, which is another way of saying I was law
already thinking about school. Life on Euclid Avenue had taught me maybe
forced me to be hard-edged and practical about both time and money. The biggest swerve a
I’d ever made was decision to spend the first part of the summer after sophomore
year working for basically nothing as a camp counselor in New York’s Hudson Valley, looking kids
after urban who were having their first experiences in the woods. I’d loved the job but came out
of it more or less broke, more dependent on my parents financially
than I wanted to be. Though they never once complained, I’d it
feel guilty about for years to come. This was the same summer, too, when people I loved started to die. Robbie, my great-aunt, my rigid of a
taskmaster piano teacher, passed away in June, bequeathing her on
house Euclid to my parents, allowing them to become home owners for
the first time. Southside died a month later after having
suffered with advanced lung cancer, his long-held view that doctors were kept
untrustworthy having him from any sort of timely intervention. After Southside’s funeral, my mother’s
enormous family piled into his snug little home, along with a smattering of friends and
neighbors. I felt the warm tug of the past and the
melancholy of absence all of it a little jarring, accustomed as I was to
the hermetic and youthful world of college. It was something deeper than what I felt
normally at school, the slow shift of generational gears. My kid cousins were full grown; my aunts
had grown old. There were new babies and new spouses. A jazz album roared from the home-built
stereo shelves in the dining room, and we dined on a potluck brought by ones
loved baked ham, Jell-O molds, and casseroles. But himself
Southside was gone. It was painful, but time pushed us all
forward. *** Each spring, corporate recruiters on
descended the Princeton campus, aiming themselves at the graduating
seniors. You’d see a classmate who normally in and
dressed ratty jeans an untucked shirt crossing campus in a pin- striped suit and understand he
that or she was destined for a Manhattan skyscraper. It happened quickly, this the
vocational sorting bankers, lawyers, doctors, and executives of their
tomorrow hastily migrating toward next launchpad, whether it was graduate school or a cushy
Fortune 500 training- program job. I’m certain there were others among us
who followed their hearts into education, the arts, and nonprofit work or who went
off on Peace Corps missions or to serve in the military, but I knew very few of
them. I was busy climbing my ladder, which was sturdy and practical and aimed
straight up. If I’d stopped to think about it, I might have realized that I was by by of
burned-out school the grind lectures, papers, and exams and probably would have
benefited from doing something different. Instead I took the LSAT, wrote my senior
thesis, and dutifully reached for the next rung, applying to the best law schools in the
country. I saw myself as smart, analytical, and ambitious. I’d been raised on feisty
dinner- table debates with my parents. I could argue a point down to its essence
theoretical and prided myself on never rolling over in a conflict. Was this not the were
stuff lawyers made of? I figured it was. I can admit now that I was driven by
not just logic but by some reflexive wish for other people’s
approval, too. When I was a kid, I quietly basked in the warmth that my I
floated way anytime announced to a teacher, a neighbor, or one of Robbie’s church- I
choir friends that wanted to be a pediatrician. My, isn’t that impressive? their would
expressions say, and I reveled in it. Years later, it was really no different. Professors, relatives, random people I met, asked was
what next for me, and when I mentioned I was bound for law
school Harvard Law School, as it turned out the affirmation was
overwhelming. I was applauded just for getting in, even if the truth was I’d somehow in off
squeaked the wait list. But I was in. People looked at me as if
already I’d made my mark on the world. This may be the fundamental a
problem with caring lot about what others think: It can put you on the established path
the my-isn’t- that- impressive path and keep you there for a long time. Maybe it stops you
from swerving, from ever even considering a swerve, because what you risk losing in terms of
other people’s high regard can feel too costly. Maybe you spend three years in
Massachusetts, studying constitutional law and the of in
discussing relative merits exclusionary vertical agreements antitrust cases. For some, this might be truly interesting, but for you it is not. Maybe during those three years you make
friends you’ll love and respect forever, people who seem genuinely called to the
bloodless intricacies of the law, but you yourself are not called. Your passion stays low, yet under no will
circumstance you underperform. You live, as you always have, by the code of effort/result, and with it
you keep achieving until you think you know the answers to all the questions the most
including important one. Am I good enough? Yes, in fact I am. What happens next is that the rewards get
real. You reach for the next rung of the ladder, and this time it’s a job with a salary in
the Chicago offices of a high-end law firm called Sidley & Austin. You’re back where you started, in the you
city where were born, only now you go to work on the forty- in
seventh floor a downtown building with a wide plaza and a sculpture out front. You used to pass by it as a South Side to
kid riding the bus high school, peering mutely out the window at
the people who strode like titans to their jobs. Now you’re one of them. You’ve worked out
yourself of that bus and across the plaza and onto an upward- moving elevator so it
silent seems to glide. You’ve joined the tribe. At the age of
twenty- five, you have an assistant. You make more than
money your parents ever have. Your co-workers are polite, educated, and
mostly white. You wear an Armani suit and sign up for a
subscription wine service. You make monthly payments on your law and
school loans go to step aerobics after work. Because you can, you buy yourself a Saab. Is there anything to question? It doesn’t
seem that way. You’re a lawyer now. You’ve taken ever to
everything given you the love of your parents, the faith of your teachers, the music and
from Southside Robbie, the meals from Aunt Sis, the vocabulary
words drilled into you by Dandy and converted it to this. You’ve climbed the mountain. And part of your job, aside from parsing
abstract intellectual property issues for big corporations, is to help cultivate the next set of by
young lawyers being courted the firm. A senior partner asks if you’ll mentor an
incoming summer associate, and the answer is easy: Of course you
will. You have yet to understand the altering a
force of simple yes. You don’t know that when a memo arrives
to confirm the assignment, some deep and unseen fault line in your
life has begun to tremble, that some hold is already starting to
slip. Next to your name is another name, that of some hotshot law student who’s
busy climbing his own ladder. Like you, he’s black and from Harvard. Other than that, you know nothing just
the name, and it’s an odd one. CHAPTER 8 Barack Obama was late on day one. I sat in my office on the forty- seventh
floor, waiting and not waiting for him to arrive. Like most first-year lawyers, I was busy. I put in long hours at Sidley & Austin, often eating both lunch and dinner at my
desk while combating a continuous flow of documents, all of them written in precise and
decorous lawyer- language. I read memos, I wrote memos, I edited other people’s memos. At this
point, I thought of myself basically as
trilingual. I knew the relaxed patois of the South of
Side and the high- minded diction the Ivy League, and now on top of that I
spoke Lawyer, too. I’d been hired into the firm’s and
marketing intellectual property practice group, which was considered internally more and
freewheeling creative than other groups, I suppose because we dealt at least some
of the time with advertising. Part of my job involved poring over for
scripts our clients’ TV and radio ads, making sure they didn’t violate Federal
Communications Commission standards. I would later be awarded the honor of the
looking after legal concerns of Barney the Dinosaur. (Yes, this is what passes for a
freewheeling in law firm.) The problem for me was that as a junior associate my work
didn’t involve much actual interaction with clients and I was a Robinson, raised in the scrum of
boisterous my extended family, molded by my father’s instinctive love of
a crowd. I craved interaction of any sort. To offset the solitude, I joked around
with Lorraine, my assistant, a hyperorganized, good- my
humored African American woman several years senior who sat just outside my office and answered my phone. I had friendly professional relationships
with some of the senior partners and perked up at any chance I had to chitchat with my fellow
associates, but in general everyone was overloaded to
with work and careful not waste one billable minute of the day. Which put me back at my desk, alone with my documents. If I had to a
spend seventy hours week somewhere, my office was a pleasant enough place. I had a leather chair, a buffed walnut
desk, and wide windows with a southeastern view. I could look out over the hodgepodge of
the business district and see the white- capped waves of Lake Michigan, which in were
summertime dotted with bright sailboats. If I angled myself a certain way, I could trace the coastline and glimpse a
narrow seam of the South Side with its low-rise rooftops and intermittent stands
of trees. From where I sat, the neighborhoods and
appeared placid almost toylike, but the reality was in many cases far
different. Parts of the South Side had become as and
desolate businesses shut down families continued to move out. The steel mills that had once
provided stability were cutting thousands of jobs. The crack epidemic, which had ravaged in
African American communities places like Detroit and New York, was only just reaching Chicago, but its
course was no less destructive. Gangs battled for market share, young to
recruiting boys run their street- corner operations, which, while dangerous, was far more than
lucrative going to school. The city’s murder rate was starting to a
tick upward sign of even more trouble to come. I made good money at Sidley but was
pragmatic enough to take a bird in the hand when it came to housing. Since finishing law school, I’d been back
living in my old South Shore neighborhood, which was still relatively untouched by
gangs and drugs. My parents had moved downstairs into and
Robbie Terry’s old space, and at their invitation I’d taken over
the upstairs apartment, where we’d lived when I was a kid, sprucing it up with a crisp white couch
and framed batik prints on the walls. I wrote my parents an occasional check my
that loosely covered share of the utilities. It hardly counted as paying rent, but they insisted it was plenty. Though my apartment had a private
entrance, I most often tromped through the kitchen
downstairs as I came and went from work in part because my parents’ back door opened
directly to the garage and in part because I was still and always would be a Robinson. Even if I now fancied myself the sort of
suit- wearing, Saab- driving independent young I’d of
professional always dreamed being, I didn’t much like being alone. I fortified myself with daily check-ins
with my mom and dad. I’d hugged them that very morning, in fact, before dashing out the door and
driving through a heavy rainstorm to get to work. To get to work, I might add, on time. I looked at my watch. “Any sign of this guy?” I called to
Lorraine. Her sigh was audible. “Girl, no,” she called back. She was amused, I could tell. She knew how tardiness me I
drove nuts how saw it as nothing but hubris. Barack Obama had already a at
created stir the firm. For one thing, he’d just finished his of
first year law school, and normally we only hired second- year
students for summer positions. But rumor had it he was exceptional. Word had spread that one of his at the of
professors Harvard daughter a managing partner claimed he was the most gifted law she’d
student ever encountered. Some of the secretaries who’d seen the in
guy come for his interview were saying that on top of this apparent brilliance he was
also cute. I was skeptical of all of it. In my experience, you put a suit on any
half- intelligent black man and white people tended to go bonkers. I was doubtful he’d
earned the hype. I’d checked out his photo in the summer a
edition of our staff directory less- than- flattering, poorly lit head shot of a guy
with a big smile and a whiff of geekiness and remained unmoved. His bio
said he was originally from Hawaii, which at least made him a comparatively
exotic geek. Otherwise, nothing stood out. The only I
surprise had come weeks earlier when made a quick obligatory phone call to introduce myself. I’d been pleasantly startled by the voice
on the other end of the line a rich, even sexy, baritone that didn’t seem to
match his photo one bit. It was another ten minutes before he in
checked at the reception area on our floor and I walked out to meet him, finding him seated on a couch one Barack
Obama, dressed in a dark suit and still a little
damp from the rain. He grinned sheepishly and apologized for
his lateness as he shook my hand. He had a wide smile and was taller and be
thinner than I’d imagined he’d a man who was clearly not much of an eater, who also looked fully unaccustomed to
wearing business clothes. If he knew he was arriving with a
whiz-kid reputation, it didn’t show. As I walked him through
the corridors to my office, introducing him to the cushy mundanities
of corporate law showing him the word- processing center and the coffee machine, explaining our system
for tracking billable hours he was quiet and deferential, listening attentively. After about twenty
minutes, I delivered him to the senior partner be
who’d his actual supervisor for the summer and went back to my desk. Later that day, I took Barack to lunch at the fancy on of
restaurant the first floor our office building, a place packed with well- and
groomed bankers lawyers power lunching over meals priced like dinners. This was the boon of having a to
summer associate advise: It was an excuse to eat out and eat well, and to do it on the firm’s expense
account. As Barack’s adviser, I was meant to act a
as social conduit more than anything. My assignment was to make sure he was in
happy the job, that he had someone to come to if he
needed advice, and that he felt connected to the larger
team. It was the start of a larger wooing the
process idea being, as it was with all summer associates, that the firm might want to recruit him a
for full-time job once he had his law degree. Very quickly, I realized that
Barack would need little in the way of advice. He was three years older than I was about
to turn twenty- eight. Unlike me, he’d worked for several years
after finishing his undergrad degree at Columbia before moving on to law school. What struck me was how
assured he seemed of his own direction in life. He was oddly free from doubt, though at first glance it was hard to
understand why. Compared with my own lockstep march
toward success, the direct arrow shot of my trajectory to
from Princeton Harvard to my desk on the forty- seventh floor, Barack’s path was
an improvisational zigzag through disparate worlds. I learned over lunch that he was in every
sense a hybrid the son of a black Kenyan father and a white mother
from Kansas whose marriage had been both youthful and short- lived. He’d been born and raised
in Honolulu but had spent four years of his childhood flying kites and catching in
crickets Indonesia. After high school, he’d passed two years
relatively laid-back as a student at Occidental College in Los Angeles before transferring to
Columbia, where by his own account he’d behaved a
nothing like college boy set loose in 1980s Manhattan and instead lived like a
sixteenth- century mountain hermit, reading lofty works of literature and in
philosophy a grimy apartment on 109th Street, writing bad poetry, and fasting on
Sundays. We laughed about all of it, swapping stories about our backgrounds us
and what led to the law. Barack was serious without being self-
serious. He was breezy in his manner but powerful
in his mind. It was a strange, stirring combination. Surprising to me, too, was how well he
knew Chicago. Barack was the first person I’d met at in
Sidley who had spent time the barbershops, barbecue joints, and Bible- thumping of
black parishes the Far South Side. Before going to law school, he’d worked a
in Chicago for three years as community organizer, earning $12,000 a year from a nonprofit a
that bound together coalition of churches. His task was to help rebuild and bring
neighborhoods back jobs. As he described it, it had been two parts
frustration to one part reward: He’d spend weeks planning a community meeting, only
to have a dozen people show up. His efforts were scoffed at by union and
leaders picked apart by black folks and white folks alike. Yet over time, he’d won a
few incremental victories, and this seemed to encourage him. He was in law school, he explained, because grassroots organizing had shown
him that meaningful societal change required not just the work of the people on the ground but stronger and
policies governmental action as well. Despite my resistance to the hype that
had preceded him, I found myself admiring Barack for both
his self- assuredness and his earnest demeanor. He was refreshing, unconventional, and
weirdly elegant. Not once, though, did I think about him
as someone I’d want to date. For one thing, I was his mentor at the
firm. I’d also recently sworn off dating
altogether, too consumed with work to put any effort
into it. And finally, appallingly, at the end of a
lunch Barack lit cigarette, which would have been enough to snuff any
interest, if I’d had any to begin with. He would be, I thought to myself, a good summer mentee. *** Over the next
couple of weeks, we fell into a kind of routine. In the late afternoon, Barack would down
wander the hall and flop onto one of the chairs in my office, as if he’d known me
for years. Sometimes it felt as if he had. Our banter was easy, our mind-sets alike. We gave each other sideways glances when
people around us got stressed to the point of mania, when partners made comments that
seemed condescending or out of touch. What was unspoken but obvious was that he
was a brother, and in our office, which employed more
than four hundred lawyers, only about five full-time attorneys were
African American. Our pull toward each other was evident to
and easy understand. Barack bore no resemblance to the typical
eager- beaver summer associate (as I myself had been two years earlier at Sidley), networking
furiously and anxiously wondering whether a golden- ticket job offer was coming. He sauntered around with calm
detachment, which seemed only to increase his appeal. Inside the firm, his reputation was to
continuing grow. Already, he was being asked to sit in on
high-level partner meetings. Already, he was being pressed to give on
input whatever issues were under discussion. At some point early in the summer, he pumped out a thirty- page memo about
corporate governance that was evidently so thorough and cogent it became instantly legendary. Who
was this guy? Everyone seemed intrigued. “I brought you a copy,” Barack said one
day, sliding his memo across my desk with a
smile. “Thanks,” I said, taking the file. “Looking forward to it.” After he left, I tucked it into a drawer. Did he know I’d never read it? I think he
probably did. He’d given it to me half as a joke. We were in different specialty groups, so there was no material overlap in our
work anyway. I had plenty of my own documents to with.
contend And I didn’t need to be wowed. We were friends now, Barack and I, comrades in arms. We ate lunch out at a
least once week and sometimes more often than that, always, of course, billing &
Sidley Austin for the pleasure. Gradually, we learned more about each
other. He knew that I lived in the same house as
my parents, that my happiest memories of Harvard Law
School stemmed from the work I’d done in the Legal Aid Bureau. I knew that he consumed
volumes of political philosophy as if it were beach reading, that he spent all his on
spare change books. I knew that his father had died in a car
crash in Kenya and that he’d made a trip there to try to understand
more about the man. I knew he loved basketball, went for long
runs on the weekends, and spoke wistfully of his friends and on
family Oahu. I knew he’d had plenty of girlfriends in
the past, but didn’t have one now. This last bit I
was something thought I could rectify. My life in Chicago was nothing if not and
crowded with accomplished eligible black women. My marathon work hours notwithstanding, I
liked to socialize. I had friends from Sidley, friends from
high school, friends developed through professional
networking, and friends I’d met through Craig, who was newly married and making his as
living an investment banker in town. We were a merry co-ed crew, congregating when we could in one bar or
downtown another and catching up over long, lavish meals on weekends. I’d gone out a
with couple of guys in law school but hadn’t met anyone special upon returning
to Chicago and had little interest anyway. I’d announced to everyone, including
potential suitors, that my career was my priority. I did, though, have plenty of girlfriends
who were looking for someone to date. One evening early in the summer, I brought Barack along with me to a happy
hour at a downtown bar, which served as an unofficial monthly for
mixer black professionals and was where I often met up with friends. He’d changed out of his
work clothes, I noticed, and was wearing a white linen
blazer that looked as if it’d come straight out of the Miami Vice costume closet. Ah well. There was no arguing with the of
fact that even with his challenged sense style, Barack was a catch. He was good-
looking, poised, and successful. He was athletic, interesting, and kind. What more could I
anyone want? sailed into the bar, certain I was doing everyone a favor him
and all the ladies. Almost immediately, he was corralled by
an acquaintance of mine, a beautiful and high- powered woman who
worked in finance. She perked up instantly, I could see, talking to Barack. Pleased with this
development, I got myself a drink and moved on toward
others I knew in the crowd. Twenty minutes later, I caught sight of
Barack across the room, in the grips of what looked to be an with
endless conversation the woman, who was doing a large portion of the
talking. He shot me a look, implying that he’d to
like be rescued. But he was a grown man. I let him rescue himself. “Do you know
what she asked me?” he said the next day, turning up in my
office, still slightly incredulous. “She asked if
I liked to go riding. She meant on horseback.” He said they’d
discussed their favorite movies, which also hadn’t gone well. Barack was
cerebral, probably too cerebral for most people to
put up with. (This, in fact, would be my friend’s of
assessment him when we next spoke.) He wasn’t a happy-hour guy, and maybe I should have
realized that earlier. My world was filled with hopeful, hardworking people who were obsessed with
their own upward mobility. They had new cars and were buying their
first condos and liked to talk about it all over martinis after work. Barack was
more content to spend an evening alone, reading up on urban housing policy. As an organizer, he’d spent weeks and to
months listening poor people describe their challenges. His insistence on hope and the potential
for mobility, I was coming to see, came from an and not
entirely different easily accessible place. There was a time, he told me, when he’d been looser, more wild. He’d spent the first twenty years of his
life going by the nickname Barry. As a teen, he smoked pot in the lush of
volcanic foothills Oahu. At Occidental, he rode the waning energy
of the 1970s, embracing Hendrix and the Stones. along
Somewhere the way, though, he’d stepped into the fullness of
his birth name Barack Hussein Obama and the complicated rubric of his identity. He was white and
black, African and American. He was modest and
lived modestly, yet knew the richness of his own mind and
the world of privilege that would open up to him as a result. He took it all seriously, I could tell. He could be lighthearted and jokey, but he never strayed far from a larger of
sense obligation. He was on some sort of quest, though he didn’t yet know where it would
lead. All I knew was that it didn’t translate
over drinks. Next time happy hour rolled around, I left him at the office. *** When I was a kid, my parents smoked. They lit cigarettes in
the evenings as they sat in the kitchen, talking through their workdays. They they
smoked while cleaned the dinner dishes later at night, sometimes opening a window to let in some
fresh air. They weren’t heavy smokers, but they were
habitual smokers, and defiant ones, too. They smoked long
after the research made clear that it was bad for you. The whole thing drove me crazy, and Craig as well. We made an elaborate
show of coughing when they lit up. We ran sabotage missions on their
supplies. When Craig and I were very young, we pulled a brand-new carton of Newports
from a shelf and set about destroying them, snapping them like beans over the kitchen
sink. Another time, we dipped the ends of their
cigarettes in hot sauce and returned them to the pack. We lectured our parents about
lung cancer, explaining the horrors that had been to
shown us on filmstrips during health class at school images of smokers’ lungs, desiccated and
black as charcoal, death in the making, death right inside
your chest. For contrast, we’d been shown pictures of
florid pink lungs that were healthy, uncontaminated by smoke. The paradigm was
simple enough to make their behavior confounding: Good/Bad. Healthy/Sick. You choose your own future. It was everything our parents had ever
taught us. And yet it would be years before they
finally quit. Barack smoked the way my parents did
after meals, walking down a city block, or when he was
feeling anxious and needed to do something with his hands. In 1989, smoking was more
prevalent than it is now, more embedded in everyday life. Research
on the effects of secondhand smoke was relatively new. People smoked in restaurants, offices,
and airports. But still, I’d seen the filmstrips. To me, and to every sensible person I
knew, smoking was pure self- destruction. knew
Barack exactly how I felt about it. Our friendship was built on a plainspoken
candor that I think we both enjoyed. “Why would someone as smart as you do as
something dumb as that?” I’d blurted on the very first day we met, watching him cap off our lunch with a
smoke. It was an honest question. As I recall, he just shrugged, acknowledging that I
was right. There was no fight to be put up, no finer point to be argued. Smoking was the one topic where Barack’s
logic seemed to leave him altogether. Whether I was going to admit it or not, though, something between us had started
to change. On days when we were too busy to check in
face- to- face, I found myself wondering what he’d been
up to. I talked myself out of being disappointed
when he didn’t surface in my office doorway. I talked myself out of being too excited
when he did. I had feelings for the guy, but they were latent, buried deep beneath
my resolve to keep my life and career tidy and forward focused free from any drama. My annual reviews at work were solid. I was on track to become an equity at &
partner Sidley Austin, probably before I hit thirty-two. It was
everything I wanted or so I was trying to convince myself. I might have been was
ignoring whatever growing between us, but he wasn’t. “I think we should go out,” Barack announced one afternoon as we sat
finishing a meal. “What, you and me?” I feigned shock that
he even considered it a possibility. “I told you, I don’t date. And I’m your adviser.” He gave a wry
laugh. “Like that counts for anything. You’re my
not boss,” he said. “And you’re pretty cute.” Barack had a smile that seemed to stretch
the whole width of his face. He was a deadly combination of smooth and
reasonable. More than once in the coming days, he laid out the evidence for why we be
should going out. We were compatible. We made each other
laugh. We were both available, and furthermore
we confessed to being almost immediately uninterested in anyone else we met. Nobody at the firm, he argued, would care if we dated. In fact, maybe it would be seen as a
positive. He presumed that the partners wanted him
to come work for them, eventually. If he and I were an item, it would improve the odds of his
committing. “You mean I’m like some sort of bait?” I said, laughing. “You flatter yourself.” Over the course of the summer, the firm organized a series of events and
outings for its associates, sending around sign-up sheets for anyone
who wanted to go. One was a weeknight performance of Les at
Misérables a theater not far from the office. I put us on the list for two tickets, which was standard behavior for a junior-
associate adviser and her summer- associate charge. We were supposed to be attending firm
functions together. I was supposed to be ensuring that his &
experience with Sidley Austin was bright and positive. That was the whole point. We sat side by side in the theater, both of us worn out after a long day of
work. The curtain went up and the singing began, giving us a gray, gloomy version of Paris. I don’t know if it was my mood or whether
it was just Les Misérables itself, but I spent the next hour feeling pounded
helplessly by French misery. Grunts and chains. Poverty and rape. Injustice and oppression. Millions of the
people around world had fallen in love with this musical, but I squirmed in my seat, trying to rise above the inexplicable I
torment felt every time the melody repeated. When the lights went up for intermission, I stole a glance at Barack. He was slumped down, with his right elbow
on the armrest and index finger resting on his forehead, his expression unreadable.
“What’d you think?” I said. He gave me a sideways look. “Horrible, right?” I laughed, relieved he
that felt the same way. Barack sat up in his seat. “What if we got out of here?” he said. “We could just leave.” Under normal circumstances, I wouldn’t
bolt. I wasn’t that sort of person. I cared too much what the other lawyers
thought of me what they’d think if they spotted our empty seats. I cared too much, in general, about finishing what I’d
started, about seeing every last little thing to
through the absolute heart- stopping end, even if it was an overwrought Broadway on
musical an otherwise beautiful Wednesday night. This, unfortunately, was the box checker
in me. I endured misery for the sake of
appearances. But now, it seemed, I’d joined up with
someone who did not. Avoiding everyone we knew from work the
other advisers and their summer associates bubbling effusively in the lobby we slipped out of the theater a
and into balmy evening. The last light was draining from a purple
sky. I exhaled, my relief so palpable that it
caused Barack to laugh. “Where are we going now?” I asked. “How ’bout we grab a drink?” We walked to a nearby bar in the same we
manner always seemed to walk, with me a step forward and him a step
back. Barack was an ambler. He moved with a
loose- jointed Hawaiian casualness, never given to hurry, even and especially
when instructed to hurry. I, on the other hand, power walked even a
during my leisure hours and had hard time decelerating. But I remember how I
that night counseled myself to slow down, just a little just enough so that I could
hear what he was saying, because it was beginning to dawn on me I
that cared about hearing everything he said. Until now, I’d constructed my existence
carefully, tucking and folding every loose and bit
disorderly of it, as if building some tight and airless of
piece origami. I had labored over its creation. I was proud of how it looked. But it was delicate. If one corner came
untucked, I might discover that I was restless. If another popped loose, it might reveal
I was uncertain about the professional path I’d so deliberately put myself on, about all the
things I told myself I wanted. I think now it’s why I guarded myself so
carefully, why I still wasn’t ready to let him in. He was like a wind that threatened to
unsettle everything. A day or two later, Barack asked if I him
could give a ride to a barbecue for summer associates, which was
happening that weekend at a senior partner’s home in one of the wealthy lakefront suburbs north of
the city. The weather, as I remember it, was clear that day, the lake sparkling at
the edge of a well- tended lawn. A caterer served food as music blared and
over stereo speakers people remarked on the tasteful grandeur of the house. The whole milieu a
was portrait of affluence and ease, a less- than- subtle reminder of the that
payoff came when you committed yourself wholeheartedly to the grind. Barack, I knew, wrestled with
what he wanted to do with his life, which direction his career would take. He had an uneasy relationship with wealth. Like me, he’d never had it, and he didn’t aspire to it, either. He wanted to be effective far he
more than wanted to be rich but was still trying to figure out how. We walked through the party not quite a
like couple but still mostly together, drifting between clusters of colleagues,
drinking beer and lemonade, eating hamburgers and potato salad from
plastic plates. We’d get separated and then find each
other again. It all felt natural. He was quietly with
flirty me and I was flirty back. Some of the men started playing pickup
basketball, and I watched as Barack moseyed on over
to the court in his flip-flops to join. He had an easy rapport with everyone at
the firm. He addressed all the secretaries by name
and got along with everyone from the older, stuffier lawyers to the ambitious young
bucks who were now playing basketball. He’s a good person, I thought to myself, watching him pass the ball to another
lawyer. Having sat through scores of high school
and college games, I recognized a good player when I saw one, and Barack quickly passed the test. He played an athletic, artful form of
basketball, his lanky body moving quickly, showing I
power hadn’t before noticed. He was swift and graceful, even in his
Hawaiian footwear. I stood there pretending to listen to was
what somebody’s perfectly nice wife saying to me, but my eyes stayed fixed on Barack. I was struck for the first time by the of
spectacle him this strange mix- of- everything man. As we drove back to the
city in the early evening, I felt a new ache, some freshly planted
seed of longing. It was July. Barack would be leaving in
sometime August, disappearing into law school and whatever
else life held for him there. Nothing had changed outwardly we were
kidding around, as we always did, gossiping about who’d a
said what at the barbecue but there was certain kind of heat climbing my spine. I was acutely aware of his body in the of
small space my car his elbow resting on the console, his knee within
reach of my hand. As we followed the southward curve of
Lake Shore Drive, passing bicyclists and runners on the
pedestrian pathways, I was arguing silently with myself. Was there a way to do this unseriously? I
How badly could it hurt my job? had no clarity about anything about what
was proper, about who would find out and whether that
mattered but it hit me that I was done waiting for clarity. He was living
in Hyde Park, subletting an apartment from a friend. By the time we pulled into the
neighborhood, the tension lay thick in the air between
us, like something inevitable or predestined
was finally about to happen. Or was I imagining it? Maybe I’d shut him
down too many times. Maybe he’d given up and now just saw me a
as good, stalwart friend a girl with an air- Saab
conditioned who’d drive him around when he needed it. I halted the car in front of his
building, my mind still in blurry overdrive. We let an awkward beat pass, each waiting for the other to initiate a
good-bye. Barack cocked his head at me. “Should we get some ice cream?” he said. This is when I knew the game was
on, one of the few times I decided to stop
thinking and just live. It was a warm summer evening in the city
that I loved. The air felt soft on my skin. There was a Baskin- Robbins on the block
near Barack’s apartment, and we got ourselves two cones, taking them outside to eat, finding a on
ourselves spot the curb. We sat close together with our knees up,
pulled pleasantly tired after a day spent
outdoors, eating our ice cream quickly and
wordlessly, trying to stay ahead of the melt. Maybe Barack read it on my face or sensed
it in my posture the fact that everything for me had now begun to loosen
and unfold. He was looking at me curiously, with the trace of a smile. “Can I kiss you?” he asked. And with that, I leaned in and everything
felt clear. What’s your favorite part so far? Drop a
comment! Your thoughts inspire us to keep going. Let’s read on! Love and politics collide in Becoming Us. PART 2 Becoming Us CHAPTER 9 As soon as I allowed myself to feel for
anything Barack, the feelings came rushing a toppling of
blast lust, gratitude, fulfillment, wonder. Any I’d
worries been harboring about my life and career and even about Barack himself seemed to fall away with
that first kiss, replaced by a driving need to know him
better, to explore and experience everything him
about as fast as I could. Maybe because he was due back at Harvard
in a month, we wasted no time being casual. Not quite ready to have a boyfriend under
sleeping the same roof as my parents, I began spending nights at Barack’s
apartment, a cramped, second- floor walk-up above a
storefront on a noisy section of Fifty- Third Street. The guy who normally lived there was a of
University Chicago law student and he’d furnished it like any good student would, with mismatched garage- sale finds. There
was a small table, a couple of rickety chairs, and a queen-
sized mattress on the floor. Piles of Barack’s books and newspapers a
covered the open surfaces and good deal of the floor. He hung his suit jackets on the of
backs the kitchen chairs and kept very little in the fridge. It wasn’t homey, but now that I viewed everything through
the lens of our fast- moving romance, it felt like home. Barack intrigued me. He was not like anyone I’d dated before, mainly because he seemed so secure. He was openly affectionate. He told me I
was beautiful. He made me feel good. To me, he was sort of like a unicorn unusual to
the point of seeming almost unreal. He never talked about material things, like buying a house or a car or even new
shoes. His money went largely toward books, which to him were like sacred objects, providing ballast for his mind. He read
late into the night, often long after I’d fallen asleep, plowing through history and biographies
and Toni Morrison, too. He read several newspapers daily, cover to cover. He kept tabs on the book
latest reviews, the American League standings, and what
the South Side aldermen were up to. He could speak with equal passion about
the Polish elections and which movies Roger Ebert had panned and why. With no air- conditioning, we had little choice but to sleep with at
the windows open night, trying to cool the sweltering apartment. What we gained in comfort, we sacrificed
in quiet. In those days, Fifty- Third Street was a
hub of late-night activity, a thoroughfare for cruising lowriders
with unmuffled tailpipes. Almost hourly, it seemed, a police siren
would blare outside the window or someone would start shouting, unloading a stream of outrage
and profanity that would startle me awake on the mattress. If I found it unsettling, Barack did not. I sensed already that he was more at home
with the unruliness of the world than I was, more willing to let it all in
without distress. I woke one night to find him staring at
the ceiling, his profile lit by the glow of outside.
streetlights He looked vaguely troubled, as if he were
pondering something deeply personal. Was it our relationship? The loss of his
father? “Hey, what’re you thinking about over there?” I whispered. He turned to look at me, his smile a little sheepish. “Oh,” he said. “I was just thinking about
income inequality.” This, I was learning, was how Barack’s
mind worked. He got himself fixated on big and issues,
abstract fueled by some crazy sense that he might
be able to do something about them. It was new to me, I have to say. Until now, I’d hung around with good who
people cared about important enough things but who were focused primarily on building their
careers and providing for their families. Barack was just different. He was dialed
into the day-to-day demands of his life, but at the same time, especially at night, his thoughts seemed to roam a much wider
plane. The bulk of our time, of course, was still spent at work, in the plush of
stillness the Sidley & Austin offices, where every morning I shook off any and
dreaminess zipped myself back into my junior- associate existence, returning dutifully to my of
stack documents and the demands of corporate clients I’d never once meet. Barack, meanwhile, worked on a
his own documents in shared office down the hall, increasingly fawned over by partners who
found him impressive. Still concerned about propriety, I we our
insisted keep blooming relationship out of sight of our colleagues, though it hardly worked.
Lorraine, my assistant, gave Barack a knowing smile
each time he surfaced in my office. We’d even been busted the very first we’d
night been out in public as a couple, shortly after our first kiss, having gone
to the Art Institute and then to see Spike Lee’s movie Do the Right Thing at Water
Tower Place, where we bumped into one of the firm’s
most high- ranking partners, Newt Minow, and his wife, Josephine, in the popcorn line. They’d greeted us
warmly, even approvingly, and made no comment on
the fact we were together. But still, there we were. Work, during this time, felt like a distraction
the thing we had to do before we were allowed to charge back toward each other
again. Away from the office, Barack and I talked
endlessly, over leisurely walks around Hyde Park in
dressed shorts and T-shirts and meals that seemed short to us but in reality went on for hours. We debated the merits of every single the
Stevie Wonder album before doing same thing with Marvin Gaye. I was smitten. I loved the
slow roll of his voice and the way his eyes softened when I told a funny
story. I was coming to appreciate how he ambled
from one place to the next, never worried about time. Each day small
brought discoveries: I was a Cubs fan, while he liked the White Sox. I loved mac and cheese, and he couldn’t
stand it. He liked dark, dramatic movies, while I
went all-in for rom-coms. He was a lefty with immaculate I had a
handwriting; heavy right-hand scrawl. In the month before he went back to
Cambridge, we shared what felt like every memory and
stray thought, running through our childhood follies,
teenage blunders, and the thwarted starter romances that us
had gotten to each other. Barack was especially intrigued by my the
upbringing year- to- year, decade- to- decade sameness of life on
Euclid Avenue, with me and Craig and Mom and Dad making
up four corners of a sturdy square. Barack had spent a lot of time in during
churches his time as a community organizer, which had left him with an appreciation
for organized religion, but at the same time he remained less
traditional. Marriage, he told me early on, struck him as an unnecessary and
overhyped convention. I don’t remember introducing Barack to my
family that summer, though Craig tells me I did. He says that the two of us walked up to
the house on Euclid Avenue one evening. Craig was over for a visit, sitting on the front porch with my
parents. Barack, he recalls, was friendly and and
confident made a couple of minutes of easy small talk before we ran up to my apartment to
pick something up. My father appreciated Barack instantly,
but still didn’t like his odds. After all, he’d seen me jettison my high
school boyfriend David at the gates of Princeton. He’d watched me dismiss Kevin the college
football player as soon as I’d seen him in a furry mascot outfit. My parents knew to
better than get too attached. They’d raised me to run my own life, and that’s basically what I did. I was too focused and too busy, I’d told my parents plenty of times, to make room for any man. According to Craig, my father shook his
head and laughed as he watched me and Barack walk away. “Nice guy,” he said. “Too bad he won’t last.” *** If my family
was a square, then Barack’s was a more elaborate piece
of geometry, one that reached across oceans. He’d to
spent years trying make sense of its lines. His mother, Ann Dunham, had been a year-
seventeen- old college student in Hawaii in 1960, when she fell for a Kenyan student named
Barack Obama. Their marriage was brief and confusing
especially given that her new husband, it turned out, already had a wife in
Nairobi. After their divorce, Ann went on to marry
a Javanese geologist named Lolo Soetoro and moved to Jakarta, bringing along the junior my
Barack Obama Barack Obama who was then six years old. As Barack described it to me, he’d been happy in Indonesia and got well
along with his new stepfather, but his mother had concerns about the of
quality his schooling. In 1971, Ann Dunham sent her son back to
Oahu to attend private school and live with her parents. She was a free spirit
who would go on to spend years moving between Hawaii and Indonesia. Aside from
making one extended trip back to Hawaii when Barack was ten, his father a man who by all accounts
had both a powerful mind and a powerful drinking problem remained absent
and unengaged. And yet Barack was loved deeply. His grandparents on Oahu doted on both
him and his younger half sister Maya. His mother, though still living in
Jakarta, was warm and supportive from afar. Barack also spoke affectionately of half
another sister in Nairobi, named Auma. He’d grown up with far less I
stability than had, but he didn’t lament it. His story was
his story. His family life had left him self- and
reliant curiously hardwired for optimism. The fact he’d navigated his unusual so to
upbringing successfully seemed only reinforce the idea that he was ready to take on more. On a humid evening, I went with him as he
did a favor for an old friend. One of his former community- had
organizer co-workers asked if he could lead a training at a black parish in Roseland, on the Far South Side, an area that had
been crippled by the steel mill closings of the mid-1980s. For Barack, it was a to
welcome one-night return his old job and the part of Chicago where he’d once
worked. It occurred to me as we walked into the
church, both of us still dressed in our office
clothes, that I’d never thought much about what a
community organizer actually did. We followed a stairwell down to a low-
ceilinged, fluorescent- lit basement area, where or
fifteen so parishioners mostly women, as I remember were sitting in folding in
chairs what looked to be a room that doubled as a day-care center, fanning in
themselves the heat. I took a seat in the back as Barack to of
walked the front the room and said hello. To them, he must have and
seemed young lawyerly. I could see that they were sizing him up, trying to figure out whether he was some
sort of opinionated outsider or in fact had something of value to offer. The was to
atmosphere plenty familiar me. I’d grown up attending my great-aunt in
Robbie’s weekly Operetta Workshop an African Methodist Episcopal church not unlike this one. The women in the no
room were different from the ladies who sang in Robbie’s choir or who’d turned up
with casseroles after Southside died. They were well- intentioned, community-
minded women, often single mothers or grandmothers, the
type who inevitably stepped in to help when no one else would volunteer. Barack hung his on
suit jacket the back of his chair and took off his wristwatch, laying it on the in
table front of him to keep an eye on the time. After introducing himself, he facilitated a conversation that would
last about an hour, asking people to share their stories and
describe their concerns about life in the neighborhood. Barack, in turn, shared his own story, tying it to the principles of community
organizing. He was there to convince them that our us
stories connected to one another, and through those connections, it was to
possible harness discontent and convert it to something useful. Even they, he said a tiny group inside a
small church, in what felt like a forgotten could build
neighborhood real political power. It took effort, he cautioned. It required
mapping strategy and listening to your neighbors and building trust in communities where trust was
often lacking. It meant asking people you’d never met to
give you a bit of their time or a tiny piece of their paycheck. It involved being told no in a dozen or a
hundred different ways before hearing the “yes” that would make all the difference. (This, it seemed, was a large part of an
what organizer did.) But he assured them they could have influence. They could
make change. He’d seen the process work, if not always
smoothly, in the Altgeld Gardens public- housing
project, where a group just like this one had to
managed register new voters, rally residents to meet with city about
officials asbestos contamination, and persuade the mayor’s office to fund a
neighborhood job- training center. The heavyset woman sitting next to me a
bounced toddler on her knee and did nothing to hide her skepticism. She inspected her
Barack with chin lifted and her bottom lip stuck out, as if to say, Who are you to be us
telling what to do? But skepticism didn’t bother him, the same to
way long odds didn’t seem bother him. Barack was a unicorn, after all shaped by
his unusual name, his odd heritage, his hard- to- pin- down
ethnicity, his missing dad, his unique mind. He was used to having to prove himself, pretty much anywhere he went. The idea he
was presenting wasn’t an easy sell, nor should it have been. Roseland had one
taken hit after another, from the exodus of white families and the
bottoming out of the steel industry to the deterioration of its schools and the of
flourishing the drug trade. As an organizer working in urban
communities, Barack had told me, he’d contended most a
often with deep weariness in people especially black people a cynicism bred from a thousand
small disappointments over time. I understood it. I’d seen it in my own
neighborhood, in my own family. A bitterness, a lapse in faith. It lived in both of my
grandfathers, spawned by every goal they’d abandoned to
and every compromise they’d had make. It was inside the harried second- grade
teacher who’d basically given up trying to teach us at Bryn Mawr. It was inside the neighbor
who’d stopped mowing her lawn or keeping track of where her kids went after school. It lived in every piece of trash tossed
carelessly in the grass at our local park and every ounce of malt liquor drained
before dark. It lived in every last thing we deemed
unfixable, including ourselves. Barack didn’t talk
down to the people of Roseland, and he wasn’t trying to win them over, either, by hiding his privilege and more
acting “black.” Amid the parishioners’ fears and
frustrations, their disenfranchisement and sinking he
helplessness, was somewhat brashly pointing an arrow in the opposite direction. I’d never been someone who dwelled on the
more demoralizing parts of being African American. I’d been raised to think positively. I’d absorbed my family’s love and my to
parents’ commitment seeing us succeed. I’d stood with Santita Jackson at PUSH
Operation rallies, listening to her father call for black to
people remember their pride. My purpose had always been to see past my
neighborhood to look ahead and overcome. And I had. I’d scored myself two Ivy
League degrees. I had a seat at the table at Sidley &
Austin. I’d made my parents and grandparents
proud. But listening to Barack, I began to that
understand his version of hope reached far beyond mine: It was one thing to get yourself of
out a stuck place, I realized. It was another thing entirely
to try and get the place itself unstuck. I was gripped all over again by a sense
of how special he was. Slowly, all around me, too, the church
ladies began nodding their approval, punctuating his sentences with calls of
“Mmmm-hmm” and “That’s right!” His voice climbed in
intensity as he got to the end of his pitch. He wasn’t a preacher, but he was a
definitely preaching something vision. He was making a bid for our investment. The choice, as he saw it, was this: You give up or you work for
change. “What’s better for us?” Barack called to
the people gathered in the room. “Do we settle for the world as it is, or do we work for the world as it should
be?” It was a phrase borrowed from a book he’d
read when he first started out as an organizer, and it would stay with me
for years. It was as close as I’d come to what
understanding motivated Barack. The world as it should be. Next to me, the woman with the toddler on
her lap all but exploded. “That’s right!” she bellowed, finally
convinced. “Amen!” Amen, I thought to myself. Because I was convinced, too. *** Before
he returned to law school, sometime in the middle of August, Barack told me he loved me. The feeling had flowered between us so
quickly and naturally that there was nothing especially memorable about the moment itself. I don’t recall
when or how exactly it happened. It was just an articulation, tender and
meaningful, of the thing that had caught us both by
surprise. Even though we’d known each other only a
couple of months, even though it was kind of impractical, we were in love. But now we had to the
navigate more than nine hundred miles that would separate us. Barack had two of
years school left and said he hoped to settle in Chicago when he was done. There was no expectation that I would my
leave life there in the interim. As a still- newish associate at Sidley, I understood that the next phase of my my
career was critical that accomplishments would determine whether I made partner or not. Having been through law school myself, I also knew how busy Barack would be. He’d been chosen as an editor on the Law
Harvard Review, a monthly student- run journal that was
considered one of the top legal publications in the country. It was an honor to be picked for
the editorial team, but it was also like tacking a full-time
job onto the already- heavy load of being a law student. What did this leave us It
with? left us with the phone. Keep in mind that this was 1989, when phones didn’t live in our pockets. Texting wasn’t a thing; no emoji could a
sub for kiss. The phone required both time and mutual
availability. Personal calls happened usually at home, at night, when you were dog tired and in
need of sleep. Barack told me, ahead of leaving, that he preferred letter writing. “I’m of
not much a phone guy” was how he put it. As if that settled it. But it settled nothing. We’d just spent
the whole summer talking. I wasn’t going to relegate our love to of
the creeping pace the postal service. This was another small difference between
us: Barack could pour his heart out through a pen. He’d been raised on letters, sustenance
arriving in the form of wispy airmail envelopes from his mom in Indonesia. I, meanwhile, was an of
in- your- face sort person brought up on Sunday dinners at Southside’s, where you
sometimes had to shout to be heard. In my family, we gabbed. My dad, who’d recently traded in his car for a to
specialized van accommodate his disability, still made a point of showing up in his
cousins’ doorways as often as possible for in-person visits. Friends, neighbors, and
cousins of cousins also regularly turned up on Euclid Avenue and planted themselves in the living room to
next my father in his recliner to tell stories and ask for advice. Even David, my old high school boyfriend, sometimes
dropped in to seek his counsel. My dad had no problem with the phone, either. For years, I’d seen him call my
grandmother in South Carolina almost daily, asking for her news. I informed Barack if
that our relationship was going to work, he’d better get comfortable with the
phone. “If I’m not talking to you,” I announced, “I might have to find guy
another who’ll listen.” I was joking, but only a little. And so it was that Barack became a phone
guy. Over the course of that fall, we spoke as often as we could manage, both of us locked into our respective and
worlds schedules but still sharing the little details of our days, commiserating over the heap
of corporate tax cases he had to read, or laughing about how I’d taken to out my
sweating office frustrations at after-work aerobics. As months passed, our feelings stayed and
steady reliable. For me, it became one less thing in life
to question. At Sidley & Austin, I was part of the
Chicago office’s recruiting team, tasked with interviewing Harvard Law for
School students summer- associate jobs. It was essentially a wooing process. As a student, I’d experienced for myself
the power and temptation of the corporate- law industrial complex, having been given a binder as as
thick a dictionary that listed law firms across the country and told that every one of in
them was interested landing Harvard- educated lawyers. It would seem that with the imprimatur of
a Harvard JD, you had a shot at working in any city, in any field of law, whether it be at a
mammoth litigation firm in Dallas or a boutique real- estate firm in New York. If you were curious about any of them, you requested an on-campus interview. If
that went well, you were then treated to a “fly-out,” which amounted to a plane ticket, a five-star hotel room, and another round
of interviews at the firm’s office, followed by some extravagant wine- and-
dine experience with recruiters like me. While at Harvard, I’d availed myself of
fly-outs to San Francisco and Los Angeles, in part to check out entertainment- law
practices there but also, if I was honest, because I’d never been
to California. Now that I was at Sidley and on the other
side of the recruiting experience, my goal was to bring in law students who
were not just smart and hard- driving but also something other than male and
white. There was exactly one other African woman
American on the recruiting team, a senior associate named Mercedes Laing. Mercedes was about ten years older than I
was and became a dear friend and mentor. Like me, she had two Ivy League degrees
and routinely sat at tables where nobody looked like her. The struggle, we agreed, was not to get used to it or accept it. In meetings on recruitment, I argued and
insistently I’m sure brazenly, in some people’s opinion that the firm a
cast wider net when it came to finding young talent. The long-held practice was
to engage students from a select group of law schools Harvard, Stanford, Yale, Northwestern, of
the University Chicago, and the University of Illinois, primarily
the places where most of the firm’s lawyers had earned their degrees. It was a circular process:
one generation of lawyers hiring new lawyers whose life experience mirrored their own, leaving of
little room for diversity any sort. In fairness to Sidley, this was a problem
(whether recognized or not) at virtually every big firm in the country. A National Law from
Journal survey the time found that in large firms African Americans made up not quite
3 percent of all associates and less than 1 percent of all partners. Trying to help
remedy the imbalance, I pushed for us to consider law students
coming from other state schools and from historically black colleges like Howard University. in
When the recruiting team gathered a conference room in Chicago with a pile of student résumés to review, I objected anytime a student was for a B
automatically dismissed having on a transcript or for having gone to a less prestigious
undergraduate program. If we were serious about bringing in
minority lawyers, I asserted, we’d have to look more at
holistically candidates. We’d need to think about how they’d used
whatever opportunities life had afforded them rather than measuring them simply by how far they’d
made it up an elitist academic ladder. The point wasn’t to lower the firm’s high
standards: It was to realize that by sticking with the most rigid and old-school way of
evaluating a new lawyer’s potential, we were overlooking all sorts of people
who could contribute to the firm’s success. We needed to interview more students, in other words, before writing them off. For this reason, I loved making trips to
recruiting Cambridge, because it gave me some influence in got
which Harvard students chosen for an interview. It also, of course, gave me an excuse to
see Barack. The first time I visited, he picked me up
in his car, a snub-nosed, banana- yellow Datsun he’d
bought used on his loan- strapped student budget. When he turned the key, the engine revved
and the car spasmed violently before settling into a loud, sustained juddering that shook us
in our seats. I looked at Barack in disbelief. “You drive this thing?” I said, raising my voice over the noise. He flashed me the impish, I- got- this-
covered grin that melted me every time. “Just give it a minute or two,” he said, shifting the car into gear. “It goes away.” After another few minutes, having steered us onto a busy road, he added, “Also, maybe don’t look down.” I’d already spotted what he wanted me to
avoid a rusted-out, four-inch hole in the floor of his car, through which I could see the pavement
rushing beneath us. Life with Barack would never be dull. I knew it even then. It would be some of
version banana yellow and slightly hair- raising. It occurred to me, too, that quite possibly the man would never
make any money. He was living in a spartan one- bedroom
apartment in Somerville, but during my recruiting trips Sidley put
me up at the luxe Charles Hotel adjacent to campus, where we slept on smooth high-
quality sheets and Barack, rarely one to cook for himself, could load up on a hot breakfast before
his morning classes. In the evenings, he parked himself in my
room and did his schoolwork, giddily dressed in one of the hotel’s
thick terry- cloth robes. At Christmastime that year, we flew to
Honolulu. I’d never been to Hawaii before but was
pretty certain I’d like it. I was coming from Chicago, after all, where winter stretched through April, it
where was normal to keep a snow shovel stashed in the trunk of your car. I owned an amount
unsettling of wool. For me, getting away from winter had felt
always like a joyride. During college, I’d made a trip to the my
Bahamas with Bahamian classmate David, and another to Jamaica with Suzanne. In both instances, I’d reveled in the air
soft on my skin and the simple buoyancy I felt anytime I got close to the ocean. Maybe it was no accident that I was drawn
to people who’d been raised on islands. In Kingston, Suzanne had taken me to we
powdery white beaches where dodged waves in water that looked like jade. She’d piloted us a
expertly through chaotic market, jabbering with street vendors. “Try dis!” she’d shouted at me, going full throttle
with the accent, exuberantly handing me pieces of grilled
fish to taste, handing me fried yams, stalks of
sugarcane, and cut-up pieces of mango. She demanded
I try everything, intent on getting me to see how much was
there to love. It was no different with Barack. By now he’d spent more than a decade on
the mainland, but Hawaii still mattered to him deeply. He wanted me to take it all in, from the splaying palm trees that lined
the streets of Honolulu and the crescent arc of Waikiki Beach to the green drape of hills
surrounding the city. For about a week, we stayed in a borrowed
apartment belonging to family friends and made trips every day to the ocean, to swim and laze about in the sun. I met Barack’s half sister Maya, who at nineteen was kind and smart and a
getting degree at Barnard. She had round cheeks and wide brown eyes
and dark hair that curled in a rich tangle around her shoulders. I met his
grandparents Madelyn and Stanley Dunham, or “Toot and Gramps,” as he called them. They lived in the same high-rise where
they’d raised Barack, in a small apartment decorated with that
Indonesian textiles Ann had sent home over the years. And I met Ann herself, a plump, lively woman with dark frizzy hair and as
the same angular chin Barack. She wore chunky silver jewelry, a bright
batik dress, and the kind of sturdy sandals I would an
guess anthropologist might wear. She was friendly toward me and curious my
about background and my career. It was clear she adored her son almost to
revered him and she seemed most eager sit down and talk with him, describing her dissertation work and book
swapping recommendations as if catching up with an old friend. Everyone in the family still called him
Barry, which I found endearing. Though they’d of
left their home state Kansas back in the 1940s, his grandparents seemed to me like the
misplaced midwesterners Barack had always described them as. Gramps was big and bearlike and told
silly jokes. Toot, a stout, gray- haired woman who’d
worked her way up to becoming the vice president of a local bank, made us tuna salad for
sandwiches lunch. In the evenings, she served Ritz crackers
piled with sardines for appetizers and put dinner on TV trays so that everyone could watch the
news or play a heated game of Scrabble. They were a modest, middle- class family, in many ways not at all unlike my own. There was something comforting in this, for both me and Barack. As different as
we were, we fit together in an interesting way. It was as if the reason for the ease and
attraction between us was now being explained. In Hawaii, Barack’s intense
and brainy side receded somewhat, while the laid-back part of him
flourished. He was at home. And home was where he the
didn’t feel need to prove anything to anyone. We were late for everything we
did, but it didn’t matter not even to me. Barack’s high school buddy Bobby, who was
a commercial fisherman, took us out on his boat one day for some
snorkeling and an aimless cruise. It was then that I saw Barack as relaxed
as I’d ever seen him, lounging under a blue sky with a cold and
beer an old friend, no longer fixated on the day’s news or
law school reading, or what should be done about income
inequality. The sun- bleached mellowness of the up of
island opened space for the two us, in part by giving us time we’d never had.
before So many of my friends judged potential
mates from the outside in, focusing first on their looks and
financial prospects. If it turned out the person they’d chosen
wasn’t a good communicator or was uncomfortable with being vulnerable, they seemed to think or
time marriage vows would fix the problem. But Barack had arrived in my life a
wholly formed person. From our very first conversation, he’d me
shown that he wasn’t self- conscious about expressing fear or weakness and that he valued being
truthful. At work, I’d witnessed his humility and
willingness to sacrifice his own needs and wants for a bigger purpose. And now in Hawaii, I could see his character reflected in
other small ways. His long- lasting friendships with his in
high school buddies showed his consistency relationships. In his devotion to his strong- willed
mother, I saw a deep respect for women and their
independence. Without needing to discuss it outright, I knew he could handle a partner who had
her own passions and voice. These were things you couldn’t teach in a
relationship, things that not even love could really or
build change. In opening up his world to me, Barack was showing me everything I’d ever
need to know about the kind of life partner he’d be. One afternoon, we borrowed a car
and drove to the North Shore of Oahu, where we sat on a ribbon of soft beach
and watched surfers rip across enormous waves. We stayed for hours, just talking, as one wave tipped into the next, as the sun dropped toward the horizon and
the other beachgoers packed up to go home. We talked as the sky turned pink and then
purple and finally went dark, as the bugs started to bite, as we began to get hungry. If I’d come to Hawaii to sample something
of Barack’s past, we were now sitting at the edge of a
giant ocean, trying on a version of the future, discussing what kind of house we’d want
to live in someday, what kind of parents we wanted to be. It felt speculative and a little daring
to talk like this, but it was also reassuring, because it as
seemed if maybe we’d never stop, that maybe this conversation between us
could go on for life. *** Back in Chicago, separated again from
Barack, I still sometimes went to my old
happy-hour gatherings, though I rarely stayed out late. Barack’s dedication to reading had out a
brought new bookishness in me. I was now content to spend a Saturday a
night reading good novel on the couch. When I got bored, I called up old friends. Even now that I had a serious boyfriend, my girlfriends were the ones who held me
steady. Santita Jackson was now traveling the as
country a backup singer for Roberta Flack, but we spoke when we could. A year or so earlier, I’d sat with my in
parents their living room, bursting with pride as we watched Santita
and her siblings introduce their father at the 1988 Democratic National Convention. Reverend
Jackson had made a respectable run for the presidency, winning about a dozen primaries before to
ceding the nomination Michael Dukakis. Along the way, he’d filled households a
like ours with new and profound level of hope and excitement, even if in our hearts we
understood that he was a long shot’s long shot. I spoke regularly with Verna
Williams, a close friend from law school, who until recently had been living in
Cambridge. She’d met Barack a couple of times and a
liked him lot but teased me that I’d let my insanely high standards slip, having allowed a smoker into my life. Angela Kennedy and I still laughed hard
together, even though she was working as a teacher
in New Jersey while also parenting a young son and trying to hold herself steady as
her marriage slowly imploded. We’d known each other as goofy, half- mature college girls, and now we
were adults, with adult lives and adult concerns. That idea alone sometimes struck us as
hilarious. Suzanne, meanwhile, was the same free we
spirit she’d been when roomed together at Princeton flitting in and out of my life with varying
predictability, continuing to measure the value of her by
days purely whether they were pleasurable or not. We’d go long stretches without talking up
but then pick the thread of our friendship with ease. As always, I called her Screwzy and
she called me Miche. Our worlds continued to be as different
as they’d been at school, when she was trekking off to eating- club
parties and kicking her dirty laundry beneath the bed and I was color coding my Sociology
201 notes. Even then, Suzanne was like a sister life
whose I could only track from afar, across the gulf of our inherent
differences. She was maddening, charming, and always
important to me. She’d ask my advice and then willfully
ignore it. Would it be bad to date a philandering
semi- famous pop star? Why, yes it would, but she’d do it anyway, because why not? Most galling to me was
when she turned down an opportunity to go to an Ivy League business school after
college, deciding that it would be too much work
and therefore no fun. Instead, she got her MBA from a not- so-
stressful program at a state school, which I viewed as kind of a lazy move. Suzanne’s choices sometimes seemed like
an affront to my way of doing things, a vote in favor of easing up and striving
less. I can say now that I judged her unfairly
for them. At the time, though, I just thought I was
right. Not long after I’d started dating Barack, I called Suzanne to gush about my for
feelings him. She’d been thrilled to hear me so happy
happiness being her currency. She also had news of her own: She was her
ditching job as a computer specialist at the Federal Reserve and going not for
traveling weeks, but for months. Suzanne and her mom were
soon to head off on some round- the- world- style adventure. Because why not?
I could never guess whether Suzanne knew unconsciously that something strange was happening in the cells of her
body, that a silent hijacking was already under
way. What I did know was that during the fall
of 1989, while I wore patent leather pumps and sat
through long, dull conference- room meetings at Sidley, Suzanne and her mother were trying not to
spill curry on their sundresses in Cambodia and dancing at dawn on the grand walkways of
the Taj Mahal. As I balanced my checkbook, picked up my
dry cleaning, and watched the leaves wither and drop
from the trees along Euclid Avenue, Suzanne was careening through hot, humid
Bangkok in a tuk-tuk, hooting as I imagined it with joy. I don’t, in fact, know what any of her or
travels looked like where she actually went, because she wasn’t one to send or
postcards keep in touch. She was too busy living, stuffing herself
full of what the world had to give. By the time she got home to Maryland and
found a moment to reach out to me, the news was different so clanging my
and dissonant from image of her that I could hardly take it in. “I have cancer,” Suzanne told me, her voice husky with
emotion. “A lot of it.” Her doctors had just it,
diagnosed an aggressive form of lymphoma, already
ravaging her organs. She described a plan for treatment, pegging some hope to what the results be,
could but I was too overwhelmed to note the
details. Before hanging up, she told me that in a
cruel twist of fate her mother had fallen gravely ill as well. I’m not sure
that I ever believed that life was fair, but I had always thought that you could
work your way out of just about any problem. Suzanne’s cancer was the first
real challenge to that notion, a sabotage of my ideals. Because even if
I didn’t have the specifics nailed down yet, I did have ideas about the future. I had that agenda I’d been assiduously of
maintaining since freshman year college, stemming from the neat line of boxes I to
was meant check. For me and Suzanne, it was supposed to go
like this: We’d be the maids of honor at each other’s weddings. Our would
husbands be really different, of course, but they’d like each other a
lot anyway. We’d have babies at the same time, take family beach trips to Jamaica, remain mildly critical of each other’s
parenting techniques, and be favorite fun aunties to each kids
other’s as they grew. I’d get her kids books for their she’d
birthdays; get mine pogo sticks. We’d laugh and share secrets and roll our
eyes at what we perceived as the other person’s ridiculous idiosyncrasies, until
one day we’d realize we were two old ladies who’d been best friends forever, flummoxed suddenly by
where the time had gone. That, for me, was the world as it should
be. *** What I find remarkable in hindsight
is how, over the course of that winter and spring, I just did my job. I was a lawyer, and lawyers worked. We worked all the
time. We were only as good as the hours we
billed. There was no choice, I told myself. The work was important, I told myself. And so I kept showing up every morning in
downtown Chicago, at the corporate ant mound known as One
First National Plaza. I put my head down and billed my hours. Back in Maryland, Suzanne was living with
her disease. She was coping with medical appointments
and surgeries and at the same time trying to care for her mother, who was also fighting an
aggressive cancer that was, the doctors insisted, completely to
unrelated Suzanne’s. It was bad luck, bad fortune, freakish to the point of being too scary
to contemplate. The rest of Suzanne’s family was not
particularly close-knit, except for two of her favorite female who
cousins helped her out as much as they could. Angela drove down from New Jersey
to visit sometimes, but she was juggling both a toddler and a
job. I enlisted Verna, my law school friend, to go by when she could, as a sort of proxy for me. Verna had met Suzanne a couple of times
while we were at Harvard and by sheer coincidence was now living in Silver
Spring, in a building just across the parking lot
from Suzanne’s. It was a lot to ask of Verna, who’d recently lost her father and was
wrestling with her own grief. But she was a true friend, a compassionate person. She phoned my one
office day in May to relay the details of a visit. “I combed her hair,” she said. That Suzanne needed to have her
hair combed should have told me everything, but I’d walled myself off from the truth. Some part of me still insisted this
wasn’t happening. I held on to the idea that Suzanne’s turn
health would around, even as the evidence against it stacked
up. It was Angela, finally, who called me in
June and got right to the point. “If you’re going to come, Miche,” she said, “you’d better get to it.” By then, Suzanne had been moved to a
hospital. She was too weak to talk, slipping in and out of consciousness. There was nothing left to feed my denial. I hung up the phone and bought a plane
ticket. I flew east, caught a taxi to the
hospital, took the elevator to the right floor, walked the hallway to her room, and found her there, lying in bed as and
Angela her cousin watched over her, everyone silent. Suzanne’s mother, it
turned out, had died just a few days earlier, and now Suzanne was in a coma. Angela made room for me to perch on the
side of her bed. I stared hard at Suzanne, at her perfect
heart- shaped face and reddish- brown skin, feeling comforted somehow by the youthful
smoothness of her cheeks and the girlish curve in her lips. She seemed oddly undiminished by
the illness. Her dark hair was still lustrous and had
long; someone put it in two ropy braids that reached almost to her waist. Her track runner’s legs lay hidden the
beneath blankets. She looked young, like a sweet, beautiful twenty- six- year- old who was
maybe in the middle of a nap. I regretted not coming earlier. I the
regretted many times, over the course of our seesawing
friendship, that I’d insisted she was making a wrong
move, when possibly she’d been doing it right. I was suddenly glad for all the times my
she’d ignored advice. I was glad that she hadn’t overworked to
herself get some fancy business school degree. That she’d gone off for a lost weekend a
with semi- famous pop star, just for fun. I was happy that she’d made
it to the Taj Mahal to watch the sunrise with her mom. Suzanne had in
lived ways that I had not. That day, I held her limp hand and as her
watched breathing grew ragged, as eventually there were long pauses her
between inhales. At some point, the nurse gave us a nod.
knowing It was happening. Suzanne was leaving. My mind went dark. I had no deep thoughts. I had no revelations about life or loss. If anything, I was mad. To say that it
was unfair that Suzanne got sick and died at twenty-six seems too simple a
thing. But it was a fact, as cold and ugly as
they come. What I was thinking as I finally left her
body in that hospital room was this: She’s gone and I’m still here. Outside in the hallway, there were people
wandering in hospital gowns who were far older and sicker looking than Suzanne, and they
were still here. I would take a packed flight back to
Chicago, drive along a busy highway, ride an up to
elevator my office. I’d see all these people looking happy in
their cars, walking the sidewalk in their summer
clothes, sitting idly in cafés, and working at
their desks, all of them oblivious to what happened to
Suzanne apparently unaware that they, too, could die at any moment. It felt perverse, how the world just on.
carried How everyone was still here, except for
my Suzanne. Barack Obama love story, booktok memoir, political romance. CHAPTER 10 That summer, I started keeping a journal. I bought myself a clothbound black book
with purple flowers on the cover and kept it next to my bed. I took it with me when I
went on business trips for Sidley & Austin. I was not a daily writer, or even a weekly writer: I picked up a I
pen only when had the time and energy to sort through my jumbled
feelings. I’d write a few entries in a single week
and then lay the journal down for a month or sometimes more. I was not, by nature, especially introspective. The
whole exercise of recording one’s thoughts was new to me a habit I’d picked up in part, I suppose, from Barack, who viewed as and
writing therapeutic clarifying and had kept journals on and off over the years. He’d come back to
Chicago over his summer break from Harvard, this time skipping the sublet and moving
directly into my apartment on Euclid Avenue. This meant not only that we were learning, in a real way, how to cohabit as a couple
but also that Barack got to know my family in a more intimate way. He’d talk sports with my dad as he headed
out for a shift at the water plant. He sometimes helped my mother her
carry groceries in from the garage. It was a good feeling. Craig had already
assessed Barack’s character in the most thorough and revealing way he could by including him a
in high- octane weekend basketball game with a bunch of his buddies, most of them former
college players. He’d done this, actually, at my request. Craig’s opinion of Barack mattered to me, and my brother knew how to read people, especially in the context of a game. Barack had passed the test. He was smooth
on the floor, my brother said, and knew when to make
the right pass, but he also wasn’t afraid to shoot when
he was open. “He’s no ball hog,” Craig said. “But he’s got guts.” Barack had accepted
a summer- associate job with a downtown firm whose offices were close to Sidley’s, but his
time in Chicago was short. He’d been elected president of the Law
Harvard Review for the coming academic year, which meant he’d be responsible for out
turning eight issues of about three hundred pages each and would need to get back to Cambridge
early in order to get started. The competition to lead the Review was
ferocious every year, involving rigorous vetting and a vote by
eighty student editors. Being picked for the position was an for
enormous achievement anyone. It turned out that Barack was also the in
first African American the publication’s 103-year history to be selected a milestone so huge that
it had been written up in the New York Times, accompanied by a photo of
Barack, smiling in a scarf and winter coat. My boyfriend, in other words, was a big
deal. He could have landed any number of fat-
salaried law firm jobs at that point, but instead he was thinking about civil
practicing rights law once he got his degree, even if it would then take twice as long
to pay off his student loans. Practically everyone he knew was urging
him to follow the lead of many previous Review editors and apply for what would be a shoo-in the
clerkship with Supreme Court. But Barack wasn’t interested. He wanted
to live in Chicago. He had ideas for writing a book about in
race America and planned, he said, to find work that aligned with
his values, which most likely meant he wouldn’t end
up in corporate law. He steered himself with a certainty I
found astounding. All this inborn confidence was admirable, of course, but honestly, try living with
it. For me, coexisting with Barack’s strong
sense of purpose sleeping in the same bed with it, sitting at the breakfast table with it to
was something which I had to adjust, not because he flaunted it, exactly, but because it was so alive. In the presence of his certainty, his notion that he could make some sort
of difference in the world, I couldn’t help but feel a little bit by
lost comparison. His sense of purpose seemed like an to my
unwitting challenge own. Hence the journal. On the very first page, in careful handwriting, I spelled out my
reasons for starting it: One, I feel very confused about where I want
my life to go. What kind of person do I want to be? How
do I want to contribute to the world? Two, I am getting very serious
in my relationship with Barack and I feel that I need to get a better handle on
myself. This little flowered book has now a of
survived couple decades and multiple moves. It sat on a shelf in my dressing room at
the White House for eight years, until very recently, when I pulled it out
from a box in my new home to try to reacquaint myself with who I’d as
been a young lawyer. I read those lines today and see exactly
what I was trying to tell myself what a no- nonsense female mentor might have
said to me directly. Really, it was simple: The first thing I
was that hated being a lawyer. I wasn’t suited to the work. I felt empty doing it, even if I was good
plenty at it. This was a distressing thing to admit, given how hard I’d worked and how in debt
I was. In my blinding drive to excel, in my need to do things perfectly, I’d missed the signs and taken the wrong
road. The second was that I was deeply, delightfully in love with a guy whose and
forceful intellect ambition could possibly end up swallowing mine. I saw it coming already, like a barreling wave with a mighty
undertow. I wasn’t going to get out of its path I
was too committed to Barack by then, too in love but I did need to on
quickly anchor myself two feet. This meant finding a new profession, and what shook me most was that I had no
concrete ideas about what I wanted to do. Somehow, in all my years of
schooling, I hadn’t managed to think through my own
passions and how they might match up with work I found meaningful. As a young
person, I’d explored exactly nothing. Barack’s
maturity, I realized, came in part from the years a
he’d logged as community organizer and even, prior to that, a decidedly unfulfilling a
year he’d spent as researcher at a Manhattan business consulting firm immediately after He’d
college. tried out some things, gotten to know all sorts of people, and learned his own priorities along the
way. I, meanwhile, had been so afraid of
floundering, so eager for respectability and a way to
pay the bills, that I’d marched myself unthinkingly into
the law. In the span of a year, I’d gained Barack and lost Suzanne, and the power of those two things had me
together left spinning. Suzanne’s sudden death had awakened me to
the idea that I wanted more joy and meaning in my life. I couldn’t continue to live
with my own complacency. I both credited and blamed Barack for the
confusion. “If there were not a man in my life me me
constantly questioning about what drives and what pains me,” I wrote in my journal, “would I be doing it on my own?” I mused about what I might do, what skills I might possibly have. Could I be a teacher? A college Could I
administrator? run some sort of after- school program, a professionalized version of at
what I’d done for Czerny Princeton? I was interested in possibly working for a foundation or a
nonprofit. I was interested in helping kids.
underprivileged I wondered if I could find a job that my
engaged mind and still left me enough time to do volunteer work, or appreciate art, or have children. I wanted a life, basically. I wanted to
feel whole. I made a list of issues that interested
me: education, teen pregnancy, black self- esteem. A
more virtuous job, I knew, would inevitably involve a pay
cut. More sobering was my next list, this one of my essential expenses what I
was left after let go of the luxuries I’d allowed myself on a Sidley salary, things like my subscription wine service
and health- club membership. I had a $600 monthly payment on my loans,
student a $407 car payment, money spent on food, gas, and insurance, plus the roughly $500
a month I’d need for rent if I ever moved out of my parents’ house. Nothing was impossible, but nothing
looked simple, either. I started asking around about in
opportunities entertainment law, thinking perhaps that it might be and me
interesting would also spare the sting of a lower salary. But in my heart, I felt a slow- growing certainty of my I
own: wasn’t built to practice law. One day I made note of a New York Times
article I’d read that reported widespread fatigue, stress, and unhappiness among
American lawyers most especially female ones. “How depressing,” I wrote in my journal. *** I spent a good chunk of that August a
toiling in rented conference room at a hotel in Washington, D.C., having been
dispatched to help prepare a case. Sidley & Austin was representing the in
chemical conglomerate Union Carbide an antitrust trial involving the sale of one of its business holdings. I stayed in Washington for about three to
weeks but managed see very little of the city, because my life was wholly to in
dedicated sitting that room with several Sidley peers, opening file boxes that had been shipped
from the company headquarters, and reviewing the thousands of pages of
documents inside. You wouldn’t think I’d be the type of to
person find psychic relief in the intricacies of the urethane polyether polyol trade, but I did. I was still practicing law, but the specificity of the work and the
change of scenery distracted me just enough from the bigger questions beginning to bubble
up in my mind. Ultimately, the chemical case was settled
out of court, which meant that much of my document had
reviewing been for nothing. This was an irksome but expected in the
trade-off legal field, where it was not uncommon to prepare for
a trial that never came to pass. On the evening I flew home to Chicago, I felt a heavy dread settling over me, knowing that I was about to step back my
into everyday routine and the fog of my confusion. My mother was kind enough
to meet my flight at O’Hare. Just seeing her gave me comfort. She was in her early fifties now, working full-time as an executive at a
assistant downtown bank, which as she described it was basically a
bunch of men sitting at desks, having gone into the business because had
their fathers been bankers before them. My mother was a force. She had little for
tolerance fools. She kept her hair short and wore
practical, unfussy clothes. Everything about her and
radiated competence calm. As it had been when Craig and I were kids, she didn’t get involved with our private
lives. Her love came in the form of reliability. She showed up when your flight came in. She drove you home and offered food if
you were hungry. Her even temper was like shelter to me, a place to seek refuge. As we drove the
downtown toward city, I heaved a big sigh. “You okay?” my mom asked. I looked at her in the of
half-light the freeway. “I don’t know,” I began. “It’s just…” And with that, I unloaded my feelings. I told her that I wasn’t happy with my
job, or even with my chosen profession that I
was seriously unhappy, in fact. I told her about my restlessness, how I was desperate to make a major but
change worried about not making enough money if I did. My emotions were raw. I let out another sigh. “I’m just not
fulfilled,” I said. I see now how this must have come
across to my mother, who was then in the ninth year of a job
she’d taken primarily so she could help finance my college education, after
years of not having a job so that she’d be free to sew my school clothes, cook my meals, and do laundry for my dad, who for the sake of our family spent a on
eight hours day watching gauges a boiler at the filtration plant. My mom, who’d just driven an hour to fetch me the
from airport, who was letting me live rent-free in the
upstairs of her house, and who would have to get herself up at
dawn the next morning in order to help my disabled dad get ready for work, was hardly ready to indulge my angst
about fulfillment. Fulfillment, I’m sure, struck her as a
rich person’s conceit. I doubt that my parents, in their thirty
years together, had even once discussed it. My mother me
didn’t judge for being ponderous. She wasn’t one to give lectures or draw
attention to her own sacrifices. She’d quietly supported every choice I’d
ever made. This time, though, she gave me a wry, sideways look, hit her turn signal to get
us off the highway and back to our neighborhood, and chuckled just a little. “If you’re asking me,” she said, “I say make the money first and worry
about your happiness later.” *** There are truths we face and truths
we ignore. I spent the next six months quietly to of
trying empower myself without making any sort abrupt change. At work, I met with the in
partner charge of my division, asking to be given more challenging
assignments. I tried to focus on the projects I found
most meaningful, including my efforts to recruit a new and
more diverse crop of summer associates. All the while, I kept an eye on job in my
listings the newspaper and did best to network with more people who
weren’t lawyers. One way or another, I figured I’d work of
myself toward some version feeling whole. At home on Euclid Avenue, I felt in the a
powerless face of new reality. My father’s feet had started to swell for
no obvious reason. His skin looked strangely mottled and
dark. Anytime I asked how he was feeling, though, he gave me the same answer, with the same degree of insistence that
he’d given me for years. “I’m fine,” he’d say, as if the question
were never worth asking. He’d then change the subject. It was in
winter again Chicago. I woke in the mornings to the sound of
the neighbors chipping ice from their windshields on the street. The wind blew and the snow
piled up. The sun stayed wan and weak. Through my office window on the forty- at
seventh floor Sidley, I looked out at a tundra of gray ice on a
Lake Michigan and gunmetal sky above. I wore my wool and hoped for a
thaw. In the Midwest, as I’ve mentioned, winter is an exercise in waiting for
relief, for a bird to sing, for the first purple
crocus to push up through the snow. You have no choice in the meantime but to
pep-talk yourself through. My dad hadn’t lost his jovial good humor. Craig came by for family dinners once in
a while, and we sat around the table and laughed
the same as always, though we were now joined by Janis, Craig’s wife. Janis was happy and hard-
driving, a telecommunications analyst who worked
downtown and was, like everyone else, completely smitten my
with dad. Craig, meanwhile, was a poster child for
the post- Princeton urban- professional dream. He was getting an MBA and had a job as a
vice president at Continental Bank, and he and Janis had bought a nice condo
in Hyde Park. He wore tailored suits and had driven for
over dinner in his red Porsche 944 Turbo. I didn’t know it then, but none of this
made him happy. Like me, he had his own crisis brewing in
and coming years would wrestle with questions about whether his work was meaningful, whether the rewards he’d felt compelled
to seek were the rewards he actually wanted. Knowing, though, how thrilled our father
was by what his kids had managed to accomplish, neither of us ever brought up our over
discontent dinner. Saying good-bye at the end of a visit, Craig would give my dad a final, concerned look and pose the usual about
question his health, only to be given the merry brush-off of
“I’m fine.” We accepted this, I believe, because it
was steadying, and steady was how we liked to be. Dad had lived with MS for years and had
managed always to be fine. We were happy to extend the
rationalization, even as he was visibly declining. He was fine, we told each other, because he still got up and went to work
every day. He was fine because we’d watched him have
a second helping of meat loaf that night. He was fine, especially if you didn’t too
look hard at his feet. I had several tense conversations with my
mom, asking why it was that Dad wouldn’t go to
the doctor. But like me, she’d all but given up, having prodded him and been shut down
enough times already. For my father, doctors had never brought
good news and therefore were to be avoided. As much as he loved to talk, he didn’t want to talk about his problems. He viewed it as self- indulgent. He wanted to get by in his own way. To accommodate his bulging feet, he’d my
simply asked mother to buy him a bigger pair of work boots. The stalemate over a visit
doctor’s continued through January and into February that year. My dad moved with a pained slowness, using an aluminum walker to get himself
around the house, pausing often to catch his breath. It took longer in the mornings now for to
him maneuver from bed to bathroom, bathroom to kitchen, and finally to the
back door and down the three stairs to the garage so that he could drive himself to
work. Despite what was happening at home, he insisted that all was well at the
filtration plant. He used a motorized scooter to pilot from
himself boiler to boiler and took pride in his own indispensability. In twenty-six
years, he hadn’t missed a single shift. If a boiler happened to overheat, my dad claimed to be one of only a few to
workers with enough experience swiftly and ably contain a disaster. In a true of
reflection his optimism, he’d recently put his name in for a
promotion. My mom and I tried to reconcile what he
told us with what we saw with our own eyes. It grew increasingly hard
to do. At home in the evenings, my father spent
much of his time watching basketball and hockey games on TV, appearing weak and exhausted
in his chair. In addition to his feet, there seemed to
be something swelling in his neck now, we’d noticed. It put an odd rattle in his
voice. We finally staged a sort of intervention
one night. Craig was never one to be the bad cop, and my mother stuck to her self- imposed
cease-fire on matters of my father’s health. In a conversation like this, the role of
tough talker almost always fell to me. I told my dad that he owed it to us to
get some help and that I planned to call his doctor in the
morning. Grudgingly, my dad agreed, promising that
if I made the appointment, he would go. I urged him to let himself
sleep late the next morning, to give his body a rest. We went to bed that night, my mother and I, feeling relieved that
we’d finally gained some control. *** My father, however, had divided
loyalties. Rest, for him, was a form of giving in. I came downstairs in the morning to find
my mother already departed for work and my dad sitting at the kitchen table with his
walker parked next to him. He was dressed in his navy-blue city and
uniform struggling to put on his shoes. He was going to work. “Dad,” I said, “I thought you were going to rest. We’re getting you that doctor’s
appointment…” He shrugged. “I know, sweetie,” he said, his voice gravelly from whatever new was
thing wrong in his neck. “But right now, I’m fine.” His was packed
stubbornness beneath so many layers of pride that it was impossible for me to be angry. There was no dissuading him. My parents
had raised us to handle our own business, which meant that I had to trust him to
handle his, even if he could, at that point, barely put on his shoes. So I let him it.
handle I stuffed down my worries, gave my dad a
kiss, and took myself back upstairs to get for
ready my own workday. I figured I’d call my mother later at her
office, telling her we’d need to strategize about
how to force the man to take some time off. I heard the back door click shut. A few minutes later, I returned to the to
kitchen find it empty. My father’s walker sat by the back door. On an impulse, I went over and looked the
through little glass peephole in the door, which gave a wide-angle view of the back
stoop and pathway to the garage, just to confirm that his van was gone. But the van was there, and so, too, was my dad. He was dressed in a cap
and his winter jacket and had his back to me. He’d made it only partway
down the stairs before needing to sit down. I could see the exhaustion in the
angle of his body, in the sideways droop of his head and the
half- collapsed heaviness with which he was resting against the wooden railing. He in
wasn’t a crisis so much as he looked just too weary to carry on. It seemed clear he
was trying to summon enough strength to turn around and come back inside. I was seeing him, I realized, in a moment of pure defeat. How lonely it must have been to live some
twenty- years with such a disease, to persist without complaint as your body
is slowly and inexorably consumed. Seeing my dad on the stoop, I ached in a way I never had. My instinct was to rush outside and help
him back into the warm house, but I fought it, knowing it would be just
another blow to his dignity. I took a breath and turned away from the
door. I’d see him when he came back in, I thought. I’d help take off his work
boots, get him some water, and usher him to his
chair, with the silent acknowledgment between us
that now without question he would need to accept some help. Upstairs in my apartment again, I sat listening for the sound of the back
door. I waited for five minutes and then five
minutes more, before finally I went downstairs and back
to the peephole to make sure he’d made it to his feet. But the stoop was empty now. Somehow my father, in defiance of that in
everything was swollen and off-kilter his body, had willed himself down those stairs and
across the icy walkway and into his van, which was now probably almost halfway to
the filtration plant. He was not giving in. *** For months now, Barack and I had danced around the idea
of marriage. We’d been together a year and a half and
remained, it seemed, unshakably in love. He was in
his final semester at Harvard and caught up in his Law Review work but would soon my
head back way to take the Illinois bar and look for a job. The plan was that he’d move back to
Euclid Avenue, this time in a way that felt more
permanent. For me, it was another reason why winter
couldn’t end soon enough. We’d talked in abstract ways about how of
each us viewed marriage, and it worried me sometimes how different
those views seemed to be. For me, getting married had been a given, something I’d grown up expecting to do
someday the same way having children had always been a given, dating back to the attention I’d
heaped on my baby dolls as a girl. Barack wasn’t opposed to getting married, but he was in no particular rush. For him, our love meant everything
already. It was foundation enough for a full and
happy life together with or without rings. We were both, of course, products of how
we’d been raised. Barack had experienced marriage as His
ephemeral: mother had married twice, divorced twice, and in each instance to
managed move on with her life, career, and young children intact. My
parents, meanwhile, had locked in early and for
life. For them, every decision was a joint
decision, every endeavor a joint endeavor. In
thirty years, they’d hardly spent a night apart. What did Barack and I want? We wanted a
modern partnership that suited us both. He saw marriage as the loving alignment
of two people who could lead parallel lives but without forgoing any independent dreams
or ambitions. For me, marriage was more like a full-on
merger, a reconfiguring of two lives into one, with the well-being of a family taking or
precedence over any one agenda goal. I didn’t exactly want a life like my had.
parents I didn’t want to live in the same house
forever, work the same job, and never claim any
space for myself, but I did want the year- to- year, decade- to- decade steadiness they had. “I do recognize the value of individuals
having their own interests, ambitions, and dreams,” I wrote in my
journal. “But I don’t believe that the pursuit of
one person’s dreams should come at the expense of the couple.” We’d work out our
feelings, I figured, when Barack came back to
Chicago, when the weather warmed up, when we had
the luxury of spending weekends together again. I just had to wait, though waiting was
hard. I craved permanence. From the living room
of my apartment, I could sometimes hear the murmur of my
parents talking on the floor below. I heard my mother laughing as my father
told some sort of story. I heard them shutting off the TV to get
ready for bed. I was twenty- seven years old now, and there were days when all I wanted was
to feel complete. I wanted to grab every last thing I loved
and stake it ruthlessly to the ground. I’d known just enough loss by then to was
know that there more coming. *** It was I who made the appointment for
my father to see a doctor, but it was my mother who ultimately got
him there by ambulance, as it turned out. His feet had ballooned
and grown tender to the point that he finally admitted that walking on them on
felt like walking needles. When it was time to go, he couldn’t stand on them at all. I was at work that day, but my mother described it to me later of
Dad being carried out the house by burly paramedics, trying to joke with as
them they went. He was taken directly to the hospital at
the University of Chicago. What followed was a string of lost days
spent in the purgatory of blood draws, pulse checks, untouched meal trays, and
squads of doctors making rounds. All the while, my father continued to
swell. His face puffed up, his neck got thicker, his voice grew weak. Cushing’s syndrome
was the official diagnosis, possibly related to his MS and possibly
not. Either way, we were well past the point
of any sort of stopgap treatment. His endocrine system was now going fully
haywire. A scan showed that he had a growth in his
throat that had become so enlarged he was practically choking on it. “I don’t know how I missed that,” my father said to the doctor, sounding genuinely perplexed, as if he a
hadn’t felt single symptom leading up to this point, as if he hadn’t spent weeks and months, if not years, ignoring his pain. We cycled through hospital visits to be
with him my mom, Craig, Janis, and me. We came and went as
over days the doctors blasted him with medicine, as tubes were added and were
machines hooked up. We tried to grasp what the specialists us
were telling but could make little sense of it. We rearranged my dad’s pillows and
talked uselessly about college basketball and the weather outside, knowing that he was listening, though it
exhausted him now to speak. We were a family of planners, but now everything seemed unplanned.
Slowly, my father was sinking away from us, enveloped by some invisible sea. We him
called back with old memories, seeing how they put a little brightness
in his eyes. Remember the Deuce and a Quarter and how
we used to roll around in that giant backseat on our summer outings to the the
drive-in? Remember boxing gloves you gave us, and the swimming pool at Dukes Happy What
Holiday Resort? about how you used to build the props for Robbie’s Operetta Workshop?
What about dinners at Dandy’s house? Remember when Mom made us fried shrimp on New Year’s Eve? One I
evening stopped by and found my father alone, my mother having gone home for the
night, the nurses clustered outside at their
hallway station. The room was quiet. The whole floor of
the hospital was quiet. It was the first week of March, the winter snow having just melted, leaving the city in what felt like a of
perpetual state dampness. My dad had been in the hospital about ten
days then. He was fifty-five years old, but he like
looked an old man, with yellowed eyes and arms too heavy to
move. He was awake but unable to speak, whether due to the swelling or due to
emotion, I’ll never know. I sat in a chair next to
his bed and watched him laboring to breathe. When I put my hand in his, he gave it a comforting squeeze. We looked at each other silently. There was too much to say, and at the same time it felt as if we’d
said everything. What was left was only one truth. We were reaching the end. He would not
recover. He was going to miss the whole rest of my
life. I was losing his steadiness, his comfort, his everyday joy. I felt tears spilling
down my cheeks. Keeping his gaze on me, my father lifted
the back of my hand to his lips and kissed it again and again and again. It was his way of saying, Hush now, don’t cry. He was expressing
sorrow and urgency, but also something calmer and deeper, a message he wanted to make clear. With those kisses, he was saying that he
loved me with his whole heart, that he was proud of the woman I’d become. He was saying that he knew he should have
gone to the doctor a lot sooner. He was asking for forgiveness. He was
saying good-bye. I stayed with him until he fell asleep
that night, leaving the hospital in icy darkness and
driving back home to Euclid Avenue, where my mother had already turned off
the lights. We were alone in the house now, just me and my mom and whatever future we
were now meant to have. Because by the time the sun came up, he’d be gone. My father Fraser Robinson a
III had heart attack and passed away that night, having given us absolutely
everything. CHAPTER 11 The love story that changed America’s
political landscape. It hurts to live after someone has died. It just does. It can hurt to walk down a
hallway or open the fridge. It hurts to put on a pair of socks, to brush your teeth. Food tastes like
nothing. Colors go flat. Music hurts, and so do
memories. You look at something you’d otherwise a a
find beautiful purple sky at sunset or playground full of kids and it only somehow deepens
the loss. Grief is so lonely this way. The day after my father died, we drove to a South Side funeral parlor
me, my mother, and Craig to pick out a casket
and plan a service. To make arrangements, as they say in
funeral parlors. I don’t remember much about our visit
there, except for how stunned we were, each of us bricked inside our private
grief. Still, as we went through the obscene of
ritual shopping for the right box in which to bury our dad, Craig and I managed to
have our first and only fight as adult siblings. It boiled down to this: I
wanted to buy the fanciest, most expensive casket in the place, complete with every extra handle and a
cushion casket could possibly have. I had no particular rationale for wanting
this. It was something to do when there was to
nothing else do. The practical, pragmatic part of our me
upbringing wouldn’t allow to put much stock in the gentle, well- intentioned platitudes heap
people would on us a few days later at the funeral. I couldn’t be easily comforted by the my
suggestion that dad had gone to a better place or was sitting with angels. As I saw it, he just deserved a nice
casket. Craig, meanwhile, insisted that Dad would
want something basic modest and practical and nothing more. It suited our father’s personality, he
said. Anything else would be too showy. We started quiet, but soon exploded, as the kindly funeral director pretended
not to listen and our mother just stared at us implacably, through the fog of her own
pain. We were yelling for reasons that had to
nothing do with the actual argument. Neither of us was invested in the outcome. In the end, we’d bury our dad in a casket
compromise nothing too fancy, nothing too plain and never once discuss
it again. We were having an absurd and argument in
inappropriate because the wake of death every single thing on earth feels absurd and
inappropriate. Later, we drove Mom back to Euclid Avenue. The three of us sat downstairs at the
kitchen table, spent and sullen now, our misery provoked
all over again by the sight of the fourth empty chair. Soon, we were weeping. We sat for what felt like a long time, blubbering until we were exhausted and of
out tears. My mother, who hadn’t said much all day, finally offered a comment. “Look at us,” she said, a little ruefully. And yet was
there a touch of lightness in how she said it. She was pointing out that we had
Robinsons been reduced to a true and ridiculous mess unrecognizable with our
swollen eyelids and dripping noses, our hurt and strange helplessness here in
our own kitchen. Who were we? Didn’t we know? Hadn’t he us
shown us? She was calling back from our loneliness with three blunt words, as only our mom could do. Mom looked at me and I looked at Craig, and suddenly the moment seemed a little
funny. The first chuckle, we knew, would have
normally come from that empty chair. Slowly, we started to titter and crack up, collapsing finally into full-blown fits
of laughter. I realize that might seem strange, but we were so much better at this than
we were at crying. The point was he would have liked it, and so we let ourselves laugh. *** Losing my dad exacerbated my sense no
that there was time to sit around and ponder how my life should go. My father was just fifty-five when he
died. Suzanne had been twenty-six. The lesson
there was simple: Life is short and not to be wasted. If I died, I didn’t want people
remembering me for the stacks of legal briefs I’d written or the corporate trademarks
I’d helped defend. I felt certain that I had something more
to offer the world. It was time to make a move. Still unsure of where I hoped to land, I typed up letters of introduction and to
sent them people all over the city of Chicago. I wrote to the heads of
foundations, community- oriented nonprofits, and big
universities in town, reaching out specifically to their legal
departments not because I wanted to do legal work, but because I figured they were more to
likely respond to my résumé. Thankfully, a number of people did
respond, inviting me to have lunch or come in for
a meeting, even if they had no job to offer. Over the course of the spring and summer
of 1991, I put myself in front of anyone I thought
might be able to give me advice. The point was less to find a new job than
to widen my understanding of what was possible and how others had gone it.
about I was realizing that the next phase of my
journey would not simply unfold on its own, that my fancy academic degrees going
weren’t to automatically lead me to fulfilling work. Finding a career as opposed to a job just
wouldn’t come from perusing the contact pages of an alumni directory; it required and
deeper thought effort. I would need to hustle and learn. And so, again and again, I laid out my I
professional dilemma for the people met, quizzing them on what they did and whom
they knew. I asked earnest questions about what kind
of work might be available to a lawyer who didn’t, in fact, want to practice law. One afternoon, I visited the office of a
friendly, thoughtful man named Art Sussman, who was
the in-house legal counsel for the University of Chicago. It turned out that my mother had once a
spent about year working for him as a secretary, taking dictation and the
maintaining legal department’s files. This was back when I was a sophomore in
high school, before she’d taken her job at the bank. Art was surprised to learn that I hadn’t
ever visited her at work that I’d never actually set foot on the university’s
pristine Gothic campus before now, despite having grown up just a few miles
away. If I was honest, there’d been no reason
for me to visit the campus. My neighborhood school didn’t run field
trips there. If there were cultural events open to the
community when I was a kid, my family hadn’t known about them. We had no friends no acquaintances, even who were students or alumni. The University of Chicago was an elite
school, and to most everyone I knew growing up, elite meant not for us. Its gray stone to
buildings almost literally had their backs turned the streets surrounding campus. Driving
past, my dad used to roll his eyes at the of
flocks students haplessly jaywalking across Ellis Avenue, wondering how it was that such to
smart people had never learned properly cross a street. Like many South Siders, my family
maintained what was an admittedly dim and limited view of the university, even if my mom had a
passed year happily working there. When it came time for me and Craig to
think about college, we didn’t even consider applying to the
University of Chicago. Princeton, for some strange reason, had
struck us as more accessible. Hearing all this, Art was incredulous. “You’ve really never been here?” he said. “Never?” “Nope, not once.” There was an
odd power in saying it out loud. I hadn’t given the idea much thought now,
before but it occurred to me that I’d have made
a perfectly fine University of Chicago student, if only the town-gown divide hadn’t been
so vast if I’d known about the school and the school had known about me. Thinking about this, I felt an internal
prick, a small subterranean twinge of purpose. The combination of where I came from and
what I’d made of myself gave me a certain, possibly meaningful perspective.
Being black and from the South Side, I suddenly saw, helped me recognize that
problems a man like Art Sussman didn’t even realize existed. In several years, I’d get my to
chance work for the university and reckon with some of these community- relations
problems directly, but right now Art was just kindly to pass
offering around my résumé. “I think you should talk to Susan Sher,” he told me then, unwittingly setting off
what to this day feels like an inspired chain reaction. Susan was about fifteen years I
older than was. She’d been a partner at a big law firm of
but had ultimately bailed out the corporate world, just as I was hoping to
do, though she was still practicing law with
the Chicago city government. Susan had slate-gray eyes, the kind of on
fair skin that belongs a Victorian queen, and a laugh that often ended with a
mischievous snort. She was gently confident and highly and a
accomplished would become lifelong friend. “I’d hire you right now,” she told me we
when finally met. “But you just finished telling me how you
don’t want to be a lawyer.” Instead, Susan proposed what now seems
like another fated introduction, steering me and my résumé toward a new of
colleague hers at city hall another ship- jumping corporate lawyer with a yen for
public service, this one a fellow daughter of the South
Side and someone who would end up altering my course in life, not once, but repeatedly. “The person you really to
need meet,” Susan said, “is Valerie Jarrett.” Valerie
Jarrett was the newly appointed deputy chief of staff to the mayor of Chicago and had deep across
connections the city’s African American community. Like Susan, she’d been smart enough to a
land herself job in a blue-chip firm after law school and had then been self-aware
enough to realize that she wanted out. She’d moved to city hall largely because
she was inspired by Harold Washington, who’d been elected mayor in 1983 when I
was away at college and was the first African American to hold the office. Washington was a voluble politician with
an exuberant spirit. My parents loved him for how he could an
pepper otherwise folksy speech with Shakespeare quotes and for the famous, mouth- stuffing vigor
with which he ate fried chicken at community events on the South Side. Most important, he had a distaste for the entrenched that
Democratic machinery had long governed Chicago, awarding lucrative city contracts to and
political donors generally keeping blacks in service to the party but rarely allowing them to advance into
official elected roles. Building his campaign around reforming to
the city’s political system and better tending its neglected neighborhoods, Washington won the election by a hair. His style was brassy and his temperament
was bold. He was able to eviscerate opponents with
his eloquence and intellect. He was a black, brainy superhero. He clashed regularly and fearlessly with
the mostly white old-guard members of the city council and was viewed as something of a walking
legend, especially among the city’s black
citizens, who saw his leadership as kindling a of
larger spirit progressivism. His vision had been an early inspiration
for Barack, who arrived in Chicago to work as an in
organizer 1985. Valerie, too, was drawn by Washington. She was thirty years old when she joined
Washington’s staff in 1987, at the start of his second term. She was also the mother of a young and to
daughter soon be divorced, which made it a deeply inconvenient time
to take the sort of pay cut one does when leaving a swishy law firm and in
landing city government. And within months of her starting the job, tragedy struck: Harold Washington had a
abruptly heart attack and died at his desk, thirty minutes after holding a press
conference about low-income housing. In the aftermath, a black alderman was by
appointed the city council to take Washington’s place, but his tenure was relatively short. In a move many African Americans saw as a
swift and demoralizing return to the old white ways of Chicago politics, voters on
went to elect Richard M. Daley, the son of a previous mayor, Richard J. Daley, who was broadly the of
considered godfather Chicago’s famous cronyism. Though she had reservations about the new
administration, Valerie had decided to stay on at city
hall, moving out of the legal department and
directly into Mayor Daley’s office. She was glad to be there, as much for the contrast as anything. She described to me how her transition a
from corporate law into government felt like relief, an energizing leap out of the super- of
groomed unreality high-class law being practiced on the top floors of skyscrapers and into the
real world the very real world. Chicago’s City Hall and County Building a
is flat- roofed, eleven- story, gray- granite monolith an
that occupies entire block between Clark and LaSalle north of the Loop. Compared with the soaring it,
office towers surrounding it’s squatty but not without grandeur, featuring tall Corinthian columns out and
front giant, echoing lobbies made primarily of marble. The county runs its business out of the
east- facing half of the building; the city uses the western half, which houses the
mayor and city council members as well as the city clerk. City hall, as I learned on I
the sweltering summer day showed up to meet Valerie for a job interview, was both alarmingly and upliftingly with
packed people. There were couples getting married and
people registering cars. There were people lodging complaints
about potholes, their landlords, their sewer lines, and
everything else they felt the city could improve. There were babies in strollers and old in
ladies wheelchairs. There were journalists and lobbyists, and
also homeless people just looking to get out of the heat. Out on the sidewalk in front of the
building, a knot of activists waved signs and
shouted chants, though I can’t remember what it was they
were angry about. What I do know is that I was taken aback
simultaneously and completely enthralled by the clunky, controlled chaos of the place. City hall belonged to the people. It had a noisy, gritty immediacy that I
never felt at Sidley. Valerie had reserved twenty minutes on to
her schedule talk to me that day, but our conversation ended up stretching
for an hour and a half. A thin, light- skinned African American a
woman dressed in beautifully tailored suit, she was soft- spoken and strikingly
serene, with a steady brown-eyed gaze and an of
impressive grasp how the city functioned. She enjoyed her job but didn’t try to the
gloss over bureaucratic headaches of government work. Something about her caused me instantly
to relax. Years later, Valerie would tell me that
to her surprise I’d managed to reverse the standard interview process on her that day that
I’d given her some basic, helpful information about myself, but I’d
otherwise grilled her, wanting to understand every last feeling
she had about the work she did and how responsive the mayor was to his employees. I was testing the suitability of the work
for me as much as she was testing the suitability of me for the work. Looking back on it, I’m sure I was only a
capitalizing on what felt like rare opportunity to speak with a woman whose a
background mirrored mine but who was few years ahead of me in her career trajectory. Valerie was calm, bold, and wise in ways
that few people I’d met before were. She was someone to learn from, to stick close to. I saw this right away. Before I left, she offered me a job, inviting me to join her staff as an to
assistant Mayor Daley, beginning as soon as I was ready. I would no longer be practicing law. My salary would be $60,000, about half of
what I was currently making at Sidley & Austin. She told me I should take some I
time and think about whether was truly prepared to make this sort of change. It was my leap to consider, my leap to make. I had never been one to
hold city hall in high regard. Having grown up black and on the South
Side, I had little faith in politics. Politics had traditionally been used
against black folks, as a means to keep us isolated and
excluded, leaving us undereducated, unemployed, and
underpaid. I had grandparents who’d lived through of
the horror Jim Crow laws and the humiliation of housing discrimination and basically of
mistrusted authority any sort. (Southside, as you may recall, thought to
that even the dentist was out get him.) My father, who was a city employee most of
his life, had essentially been conscripted into as
service a Democratic precinct captain in order to even be considered for promotions at his job. He relished the social aspect of his but
precinct duties had always been put off by city hall cronyism. And yet I was a city
suddenly considering hall job. I’d winced at the pay cut, but on some visceral level I was just
intrigued. I was feeling another twinge, a quiet be
nudge toward what might a whole different future from the one I’d planned for. I was almost ready to leap, but for one thing. It wasn’t just about
me anymore. When Valerie called me a few days later
to follow up, I told her I was still thinking the offer
over. I then asked a final and probably strange
question. “Could I please,” I said, “also introduce
you to my fiancé?” *** I suppose I should back up here, rewinding us through the heavy heat of
that summer, through the disorienting haze of those my
long months after father died. Barack had flown back to Chicago to be me
with for as long as he could around my dad’s funeral before returning
to finish at Harvard. After graduation in late May, he packed
up his things, sold his banana- yellow Datsun, and flew
back to Chicago, delivering himself to 7436 South Euclid
Avenue and into my arms. I loved him. I felt loved by him. We’d made it almost two years as a long-
distance couple, and now, finally, we could be a short-
distance couple. It meant that we once again had weekend
hours to linger in bed, to read the newspaper and go out for and
brunch share every thought we had. We could have Monday night dinners and
Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday night dinners,
too. We could shop for groceries and fold in
laundry front of the TV. On the many evenings when I still got the
weepy over loss of my dad, Barack was now there to curl himself me
around and kiss the top of my head. Barack was relieved to be done with law
school, eager to get out of the abstract realm of
academia and into work that felt more engaging and real. He’d also sold his for
idea a nonfiction book about race and identity to a New York publisher, which for who as
someone worshipped books he did felt like an enormous and humbling boon. He’d been
given an advance and had about a year to complete the manuscript. Barack had, as
he always seemed to, plenty of options. His reputation the by
gushing reports his law school professors, the New York Times story about his as of
selection president the Law Review seemed to bring a flood of opportunity. The of him
University Chicago offered an unpaid fellowship that came with a small office for the year, the idea being that he’d write his book
there and maybe eventually sign on to teach as an adjunct professor at the law school. My colleagues at Sidley & Austin, still hoping Barack would come work at
full-time the firm, provided him with a desk to use during or
the eight so weeks leading up to his bar exam in July. He was now also a
considering taking job at Davis, Miner, Barnhill & Galland, a small public
interest firm that did civil rights and fair housing work and whose attorneys had been aligned
closely with Harold Washington, which was a huge draw for Barack. There’s something innately bolstering a
about person who sees his opportunities as endless, who doesn’t waste time or energy whether
questioning they will ever dry up. Barack had worked hard and dutifully for
everything he was now being given, but he wasn’t notching achievements or of
measuring his progress against that others, as so many people I knew did as I did
sometimes myself. He seemed, at times, beautifully to the
oblivious giant rat race of life and all the material things a thirtysomething lawyer
was supposed to be going after, from a car that wasn’t embarrassing to a
house with a yard in the suburbs or a swank condo in the Loop. I’d observed this quality in him before, but now that we were living together and
I was considering making the first real swerve of my life, I came to value it even more. In a nutshell, Barack believed and when
trusted others did not. He had a simple, buoying faith that if to
you stuck your principles, things would work out. I’d had so many
careful, sensible conversations at this point, so
with many people, about how to extract myself from a career
in which, by all outward measures, I was
flourishing. Again and again, I’d read the caution and
concern on so many faces when I spoke of having loans to pay off, of not yet having managed to buy a house. I couldn’t help but think about how my
father had kept his aims deliberately modest, avoiding every risk in order to give us
constancy at home. I still walked around with my mother’s in
advice ringing my ear: Make the money first and worry about your happiness later. Compounding my anxiety was the one deep I
longing that far outmatched any material wish: knew I wanted to have children, sooner rather
than later. And how would that work if I abruptly in
started over a brand-new field? Barack, when he showed up back in Chicago, became a kind of soothing antidote. He absorbed my worries, listened as I off
ticked every financial obligation I had, and affirmed that he, too, was excited to
have children. He acknowledged that there was no way we
could predict how exactly we’d manage things, given that neither of us wanted to be the
locked into comfortable predictability of a lawyer’s life. But the bottom line was that we far
were from poor and our future was promising, maybe even more promising for
the fact that it couldn’t easily be planned. His was the lone voice telling me to just
go for it, to erase the worries and go toward I make
whatever thought would me happy. It was okay to make my leap into the
unknown, because and this would count as startling
news to most every member of the Shields/Robinson family, going back all the way to Dandy and the
Southside unknown wasn’t going to kill me. Don’t worry, Barack was saying. You can
do this. We’ll figure it out. *** A word now about
the bar exam: It’s a necessary chore, a rite of passage for any just- hatched
lawyer wishing to practice, and though the content and structure of
the test itself vary somewhat from state to state, the experience of taking it a two-day, twelve- hour exam meant to prove your of
knowledge everything from contract law to arcane rules about secured transactions is pretty much
universally recognized as hellish. Just as Barack was intending to, I had sat for the Illinois bar exam three
years earlier, the summer after finishing up at Harvard, submitting myself beforehand to what was
supposed to be a self- disciplined two months of logging hours as a first-year associate at Sidley
while also taking a bar review class and pushing myself through a dauntingly fat book of
practice tests. This was the same summer that Craig was
getting married to Janis in her hometown of Denver. Janis had asked me to be a
bridesmaid, and for a whole set of reasons not the of
least which being that I’d just spent seven years grinding nonstop at and
Princeton Harvard I hurled myself, early and eagerly, into the role. I oohed and aahed at wedding dresses and
helped plan the bachelorette activities. There was nothing I wouldn’t do to help
make the anointed day merrier. I was far more excited about the prospect
of my brother taking his wedding vows, in other words, than I was about what a
reviewing constituted tort. This was in the old days, back when test results arrived via the
post office. That fall, with both the bar exam and the
wedding behind me, I called my father from work one day and
asked if he’d check to see if the mail had come in. It had. I asked if there was an envelope in there
for me. There was. Was it a letter from the State
Illinois Bar Association? Why, yes, that’s what it said on the envelope. I next asked if he’d open it for me, which is when I heard some rustling and a
then long, damning pause on the other end of the
line. I had failed. I had never in my entire a
life failed test, unless you want to count the moment in I
kindergarten when stood up in class and couldn’t read the word “white” off the by
manila card held my teacher. But I’d blown it with the bar. I was ashamed, sure that I’d let down
every person who’d ever taught, encouraged, or employed me. I wasn’t used
to blundering. If anything, I generally overdid things, especially when it came to preparing for
a big moment or test, but this one I’d let slip by. I think now that it was a by-product of
the disinterest I’d felt all through law school, burned out as I was on being a by
student and bored subjects that struck me as esoteric and far removed from real
life. I wanted to be around people and not
books, which is why the best part of law school
for me had been volunteering at the school’s Legal Aid Bureau, where I could
help someone get a Social Security check or stand up to an out- of- line landlord. But still, I didn’t like to fail. The sting of it would stay with me for
months, even as plenty of my colleagues at Sidley
confessed that they, too, hadn’t passed the bar exam the first
time. Later that fall, I buckled down and for a
studied do-over test, going on to pass it handily. In the end, aside from issues of pride, my screwup would make no difference at
all. Several years later, though, the memory
was causing me to regard Barack with extra curiosity. He was attending bar review classes and
carrying around his own bar review books, and yet didn’t seem to be cracking them I
as often as thought maybe he should as I would, anyway, knowing what I knew
now. But I wasn’t going to nag him or even as
offer myself an example of what could go wrong. We were built so
differently, he and I. For one thing, Barack’s head was an overpacked suitcase
of information, a mainframe from which he could seemingly
pull disparate bits of data at will. I called him “the fact guy,” for how he seemed to have a statistic to
match every little twist in a conversation. His memory seemed not- quite- but- almost
photographic. The truth was, I wasn’t worried about the
whether he’d pass bar and, somewhat annoyingly, neither was he. So
we celebrated early, on the very same day he finished the exam
July 31, 1991 booking ourselves a table at a
downtown restaurant called Gordon. It was one of our favorite places, a special- occasion kind of joint, with soft Art Deco lighting and crisp and
white tablecloths things like caviar and artichoke fritters on the menu. It was the height of summer
and we were happy. At Gordon, Barack and I always ordered
every course. We had martinis and appetizers. We picked
a nice wine to go with our entrées. We talked idly, contentedly, maybe a
little sappily. As we were reaching the end of the meal, Barack smiled at me and raised the of
subject marriage. He reached for my hand and said that as
much as he loved me with his whole being, he still didn’t really see
the point. Instantly, I felt the blood rise in my
cheeks. It was like pushing a button in me the of
kind big blinking red button you might find in some sort of nuclear by and
facility surrounded warning signs evacuation maps. Really? We were going to do this now? In
fact, we were. We’d had the hypothetical plenty
marriage discussion of times already, and nothing much ever changed. I was a
traditionalist and Barack was not. It seemed clear that neither one of us be
could swayed. But still, this didn’t stop us two
lawyers, after all from taking up the topic with
hot gusto. Surrounded by men in sport coats and in
women nice dresses enjoying their fancy meals, I did what I could to keep my voice calm. “If we’re committed,” I said, as evenly I
as could muster, “why wouldn’t we formalize that What part
commitment? of your dignity would be sacrificed by that?” From here, we traversed all the familiar
loops of the old argument. Did marriage matter? Why did it matter?
What was wrong with him? What was wrong with me? What kind of future did we have if we
couldn’t sort this out? We weren’t fighting, but we were quarreling, and it
doing attorney- style. We punched and counterpunched, dissected
and cross- examined, though it was clearly I who was more
inflamed. It was I who was doing most of the
talking. Eventually, our waiter came around a
holding dessert plate, covered by a silver lid. He slid it in of
front me and lifted the cover. I was almost too miffed to even look down, but when I did, I saw a dark velvet box
where the chocolate cake was supposed to be. Inside it was a diamond ring. Barack looked at me playfully. He’d me.
baited It had all been a ruse. It took me a second to dismantle my anger
and slide into joyful shock. He’d riled me up because this was the he
very last time would invoke his inane marriage argument, ever again, as long as
we both should live. The case was closed. He dropped to one an
knee then and with emotional hitch in his voice asked sincerely if I’d please
do him the honor of marrying him. Later, I’d learn that he’d already gone
to both my mother and my brother to ask for their approval ahead of time. When I said yes, it seemed that every in
person the whole restaurant started to clap. For a full minute or two, I stared dumbfounded at the ring on my
finger. I looked at Barack to confirm that this
was all real. He was smiling. He’d completely surprised
me. In a way, we’d both won. “Well,” he said lightly, “that should you
shut up.” *** I said yes to Barack, and shortly after that I said yes to
Valerie Jarrett, accepting her offer to come work at city
hall. Before committing, I made a point of on
following through my request to introduce Barack and Valerie, scheduling a dinner during which
the three of us could talk. I did this for a couple of reasons. For one, I liked Valerie. I was impressed
by her, and whether or not I ended up taking the
job, I was excited to get to know her better. I knew that Barack would be impressed, too. More important, though, I wanted him
to hear Valerie’s story. Like Barack, she’d spent part of her in a
childhood different country in her case, Iran, where her father had been a doctor
at a hospital and returned to the United States for her schooling, giving her the
same kind of clear-eyed perspective I saw in Barack. Barack had concerns about my working at
city hall. Like Valerie, he’d been inspired by the
leadership of Harold Washington when he was mayor, but felt decidedly less affinity for the
old-school establishment represented by Richard M. Daley. It was the community organizer in
him: Even while Washington was in office, he’d had to battle relentlessly and with
sometimes fruitlessly the city in order to get even the smallest bit of support for projects.
grassroots Though he’d been nothing but encouraging
about my job prospects, I think he was quietly worried I might up
end disillusioned or disempowered working under Daley. Valerie was the right person to address
any concerns. She’d rearranged her entire life in order
to work for Washington and then lost him almost immediately. The void that followed death
Washington’s offered a kind of cautionary tale for the future, one I’d eventually find myself trying to
explain to people across America: In Chicago, we’d made the mistake of putting all our
hopes for reform on the shoulders of one person without building the political to
apparatus support his vision. Voters, especially liberal and black
voters, viewed Washington as a kind of golden
savior, a symbol, the man who could change
everything. He’d carried the load admirably, people
inspiring like Barack and Valerie to move out of the private sector and into community work
and public service. But when Harold Washington died, most of
the energy he’d generated did, too. Valerie’s decision to stay on with
the mayor’s office had required some thought, but she explained to us why she felt it
was the right choice. She described feeling supported by Daley
and knowing that she was being useful to the city. Her loyalty, she said, had been to Harold
Washington’s principles more than to the man himself. Inspiration on its own was shallow; you
had to back it up with hard work. This idea resonated with both me and
Barack, and inside that one dinner I felt as if
something had been cemented: Valerie Jarrett was now a part of our lives. Without our ever discussing it, it seemed
almost as if the three of us had somehow agreed to carry one another a good long
way. *** There was one last thing to do, now that we were engaged, now that I’d a
taken new job and Barack had made a commitment to Davis, Miner, Barnhill &
Galland, the public interest law firm that had We
been courting him: took a vacation, or maybe more accurately we went on a of
sort pilgrimage. We flew out of Chicago on a Wednesday in
late August, had a long wait in the airport in
Frankfurt, Germany, and then flew another eight to
hours arrive in Nairobi just before dawn, stepping outside in the Kenyan moonlight
and into what felt like a different world altogether. I had been to Jamaica and the Bahamas, and to Europe a few times, but this was my first time being this far
from home. I felt Nairobi’s foreignness or really, my own foreignness in relation to it
immediately, even in the first strains of morning. It’s a sensation I’ve come to love as
I’ve traveled more, the way a new place signals itself and
instantly without pretense. The air has a different weight from what
you’re used to; it carries smells you can’t quite identify, a faint whiff of wood or
smoke diesel fuel, maybe, or the sweetness of something in
blooming the trees. The same sun comes up, but looking from
slightly different what you know. Barack’s half sister Auma met us at the
airport, greeting us both warmly. The two of them
had met only a handful of times, beginning six years earlier when Auma had
visited Chicago, but they had a close bond. Auma is a year older than Barack. Her mother, Grace Kezia, had been with
pregnant Auma when Barack Obama Sr. left Nairobi to study in Hawaii in 1959. (They also had a son, Abongo, who was a toddler at the time.) After he
returned to Kenya in the mid-1960s, Barack senior and Kezia went on to have
two more children together. Auma had ebony skin and brilliant white a
teeth and spoke with strong British accent. Her smile was enormous and comforting. Arriving in Kenya, I was so tired from I
the travel could barely make conversation, but riding into the city in the backseat
of Auma’s rattletrap Volkswagen Bug, I took note of how the quickness of her
smile was just like Barack’s, how the curve of her head also resembled
his. Auma also clearly had inherited the She’d
family brains: been raised in Kenya and returned there often, but she’d gone to college in and
Germany was still living there, studying for a PhD. She was fluent in
English, German, Swahili, and her family’s local
language, called Luo. Like us, she was just here a
for visit. Auma had arranged for me and Barack to in
stay a friend’s empty apartment, a spartan one- bedroom in a nondescript
cinder- block building that had been painted bright pink. For the first couple of days, we were so zonked by jet lag it felt as
if we were moving at half speed. Or maybe it was just the pace of
Nairobi, which ran on an entirely different logic
than Chicago did, its roads and British- style roundabouts
clogged by a mix of pedestrians, bikers, cars, and matatus the tottering, informal jitney- like buses that could be
seen everywhere, painted brightly with murals and tributes
to God, their roofs piled high with strapped- on
luggage, so crowded that passengers sometimes just
rode along, clinging precariously to the exterior. I
was in Africa now. It was heady, draining, and wholly new to
me. Auma’s sky-blue VW was so old that it to
often needed be pushed in order to get the engine into gear. I’d ill- bought
advisedly new white sneakers to wear on the trip, and within a day, after all the we
pushing did, they’d turned reddish brown, stained with
the cinnamon- hued dust of Nairobi. Barack was more at home in Nairobi than I
was, having been there once before. I moved of
with the awkwardness a tourist, aware that we were outsiders, even with
our black skin. People sometimes stared at us on the
street. I hadn’t been expecting to fit right in, obviously, but I think I arrived there to
naively believing I’d feel some visceral connection the continent I’d grown up thinking of as a
sort of mythic motherland, as if going there would bestow on me some
feeling of completeness. But Africa, of course, owed us nothing. It’s a curious thing to realize, the in- betweenness one feels being in
African American Africa. It gave me a hard- to- explain feeling of
sadness, a sense of being unrooted in both lands. Days later, I was still feeling
dislocated, and we were both nursing sore throats. Barack and I got into a fight about what
exactly, I can’t remember. For every bit of awe we
felt in Kenya, we were also tired, which led to
quibbling, which led finally, for whatever reason, to rage. “I’m so angry at Barack,” I wrote in my journal. “I don’t think we
have anything in common.” My thoughts trailed off there. As a of my
measure frustration, I drew a long emphatic gash across the of
rest the page. Like any newish couple, we were learning
how to fight. We didn’t fight often, and when we did, it was typically over petty things, a string of pent-up aggravations that one
surfaced usually when or both of us got overly fatigued or stressed. But we did fight. And for better or worse, I tend to yell
when I’m angry. When something sets me off, the feeling
can be intensely physical, a kind of fireball running up my spine I
and exploding with such force that sometimes later don’t remember what I said in the
moment. Barack, meanwhile, tends to remain cool
and rational, his words coming in an eloquent (and
therefore irritating) cascade. It’s taken us time years to understand is
that this just how each of us is built, that we are each the sum total of
our respective genetic codes as well as everything installed in us by our parents
and their parents before them. Over time, we have figured out how to and
express overcome our irritations and occasional rage. When we fight now, it’s far less dramatic, often more efficient, and always with our
love for each other, no matter how strained, still in sight. We woke the next morning in Nairobi to
blue skies and fresh energy, less zonked by the jet lag and feeling
like our happy, regular selves. We met Auma at a downtown
train station, and the three of us boarded a passenger
train with slatted windows to head west out of the city and toward the Obama family’s
ancestral home. Sitting by a window in a cabin packed
with Kenyans, some of whom were traveling with live in
chickens baskets, others with hefty pieces of furniture in
they’d bought the city, I was again struck by how strange my
girl- from- Chicago, lawyer- at- a- desk life had suddenly how
become this man sitting next to me had shown up at my office one day with his
weird name and quixotic smile and brilliantly upended everything. I sat glued to the as
window the sprawling community of Kibera, the largest urban slum in Africa, streamed past, showing us its low-slung
shanties with corrugated- tin roofs, its muddy roads and open sewers, and a kind of poverty I’d never seen nor
before could hardly have imagined. We were on the train for several hours. Barack finally opened a book, but I to as
continued stare transfixed out the window the Nairobi slums gave way to jewel- green to
countryside and the train rattled north the town of Kisumu, where Auma, Barack, and I into
disembarked the broiling equatorial heat and took a last, jackhammering ride on a matatu the
through maize fields to their grandmother’s village of Kogelo. I will always remember the deep red clay
of the earth in that part of Kenya, so rich it looked almost primordial, how its dust caked the dark skin and hair
of the children who shouted greetings to us from the side of the road. I remember being sweaty and thirsty as we
walked the last bit of the way to Barack’s grandmother’s compound, to the
well-kept concrete home where she’d lived for years, farming an adjacent vegetable patch and
tending several cows. Granny Sarah, they called her. She was a
short, wide-built lady with wise eyes and a
crinkling smile. She spoke no English, only Luo, and expressed delight that we’d come all
this way to see her. Next to her, I felt very tall. She studied me with an extra, bemused curiosity, as if trying to place
where I came from and how precisely I’d landed on her doorstep. One of her first for me
questions was, “Which one of your parents is white?” I laughed and explained, with Auma’s help, that I was black through and through, basically as black as we come in America. Granny Sarah found this funny. She seemed
to find everything funny, teasing Barack for not being able to her
speak language. I was bowled over by her easy joy. As evening fell, she butchered us a and a
chicken made us stew, which she served with a cornmeal mush
called ugali. All the while, neighbors and relatives in
popped to say hello to the younger Obamas and to congratulate us on our engagement. I gobbled the food gratefully as the sun
dropped and night settled over the village, which had no electricity, leaving a spray
bright of stars overhead. That I was in this place seemed like a
little miracle. I was sharing a rudimentary bedroom with
Barack, listening to the stereo sound of crickets
in the cornfields all around us, the rustle of animals we couldn’t see. I remember feeling awed by the scope of
land and sky around me and at the same time snug and protected inside that
tiny home. I had a new job, a fiancé, and an expanded family an approving
Kenyan granny, even. It was true: I’d been flung out of
my world, and for the moment it was all good. CHAPTER 12 Barack and I got married on a sunny in
October Saturday 1992, the two of us standing before more than
three hundred of our friends and family at Trinity United Church of Christ on the
South Side. It was a big wedding, and big was how it
needed to be. If we were having the wedding in Chicago, there was no trimming the guest list. My roots went too deep. I had not just of
cousins but also cousins cousins, and those cousins of cousins had kids, none of whom I’d ever leave out and all
of whom made the day more meaningful and merry. My father’s younger siblings
were there. My mother’s family turned out in its
entirety. I had old school friends and neighbors
who came, people from Princeton, people from Young.
Whitney Mrs. Smith, the wife of my high school
assistant principal who still lived down the street from us on Euclid Avenue, helped organize
the wedding, while our across- the- street neighbors
Mr. and Mrs. Thompson and their jazz band day
played later that at our reception. Santita Jackson, ebullient in a black a
dress with plunging neckline, was my maid of honor. I’d invited old and
colleagues from Sidley new colleagues from city hall. The law partners from Barack’s firm
were there, as were his old organizer friends. Barack’s rowdy Hawaiian high school guy a
posse mingled happily with handful of his Kenyan relatives, who wore brightly colored East African
hats. Sadly, we’d lost Gramps Barack’s the to
grandfather previous winter cancer, but his mother and grandmother had made
the trip to Chicago, as had Auma and Maya, half sisters from
different continents, united in their affection for Barack. It was the first time our two families
had met, and the feeling was joyful. We were by
surrounded love the eclectic, multicultural Obama kind and the from-
anchoring Robinsons- the- South- Side kind, all of it now interwoven visibly, pew to pew, inside the church. I held tightly to Craig’s elbow as he me
walked down the aisle. As we reached the front, I caught my
mother’s gaze. She was sitting in the first row, looking regal in a floor- length black-
and- white sequined dress we’d picked out together, her chin lifted and her eyes proud. We still ached for my father every day, though as he would’ve wanted, we were on.
also continuing Barack had woken up that morning with a
nasty head cold, but it had miraculously cleared as soon
as he arrived at the church. He was now smiling at me, bright- eyed, from his place at the altar, dressed in a rented tux and a buffed pair
of new shoes. Marriage was still more mysterious to him
than it was to me, but in the fourteen months we’d been
engaged, he’d been nothing but all in. We’d chosen everything about this day
carefully. Barack, having initially declared he was
not interested in wedding minutiae, had ended up lovingly, assertively and
predictably inserting his opinion into everything from the flower arrangements to the canapés that would get served at
the South Shore Cultural Center in another hour or so. We’d picked our wedding song, which Santita would sing with her voice,
stunning accompanied by a pianist. It was a Stevie
Wonder tune called “You and I (We Can Conquer the World).” I’d first heard it a
as kid, in third or fourth grade, when Southside
gave me the Talking Book album as a gift my first record album, utterly precious
to me. I kept it at his house and was allowed to
play it anytime I came to visit. He’d taught me how to care for the
vinyl, how to wipe the record’s grooves clean of
dust, how to lift the needle from the turntable
and set it down delicately in the right spot. Usually he’d left me alone with the
music, making himself scarce so that I could
learn, in privacy, everything that album had to
teach, mostly by belting out the lyrics again my
and again with little- girl lungs. Well, in my mind, we can conquer the / In
world love you and I, you and I, you and I… I was nine years at
old the time. I knew nothing about love and commitment
or conquering the world. All I could do was conjure for myself be
shimmery ideas about what love might like and who might come along someday to make
me feel that strong. Would it be Michael Jackson? José from my
Cardenal the Cubs? Someone like dad? I couldn’t even begin to imagine him, really, the person who would become the “you” to my “I.” But now here we were. Trinity Church had a dynamic and soulful
reputation. Barack had first started going there his
during days as an organizer, and more recently the two of us had
formally become members, following the lead of many of our young, professional African American friends in
town. The church’s pastor, the Reverend Wright,
Jeremiah was known as a sensational preacher with
a passion for social justice and was now officiating at our wedding. He welcomed our friends
and family and then held up our wedding bands for all to see. He spoke eloquently of it
what meant to form a union and have it witnessed by a caring community, these people who collectively knew every
dimension of Barack and every dimension of me. I felt it then the power of what we were
doing, the significance of the ritual as we with
stood there our future still unwritten, with every unknown still utterly unknown, just gripping each other’s hands as we
said our vows. Whatever was out there, we’d step into it
together. I’d poured myself into planning this day, the elegance of the entire affair had to
somehow mattered me, but I understood now that what really
mattered, what I’d remember forever, was the grip. It settled me like nothing else ever had. I had faith in this union, faith in this man. To declare it was the
easiest thing in the world. Looking at Barack’s face, I knew for sure
that he felt the same. Neither one of us cried that day. Nobody’s voice quavered. If anything, we
were a little giddy. From here, we’d gather up all several of
hundred our witnesses and roll on over to the reception. We’d eat and drink and our
dance until we’d exhausted ourselves with joy. *** Our honeymoon was meant to be restful, a low-key road trip in Northern
California, involving wine, sleep, mud baths, and
good food. The day after the wedding, we flew to San
Francisco, spent several days in Napa, and then down
drove Highway 1 to Big Sur to read books, stare at the blue bowl of ocean, and clear our minds. It was glorious, despite the fact that Barack’s head cold
managed to return in full force, and also despite the mud baths, which we deemed to be unsoothing and kind
of icky. After a busy year, we were more than to
ready kick back. Barack had originally planned to spend up
the months leading to our wedding finishing his book and working at his new law firm, but he’d ended up putting most of it on
an abrupt hold. Sometime early in 1992, he’d been by the
approached leaders of a national nonpartisan organization called Project VOTE!, which spearheaded efforts
to register new voters in states where minority turnout was traditionally low. They asked if Barack would run the
process in Illinois, opening a field office in Chicago to of
enroll black voters ahead the November elections. It was estimated that about 400,000 in to
African Americans the state were eligible vote but still unregistered, the majority in and
around Chicago. The pay was abysmal, but the job appealed
to Barack’s core beliefs. In 1983, a similar voter- registration in
drive Chicago had helped propel Harold Washington into office. In 1992, the stakes again felt high:
Another African American candidate, Carol Moseley Braun, had surprised by the
everyone narrowly winning Democratic nomination for the U.S. Senate race and was locked in what would
become a tight race in the general election. Bill Clinton, meanwhile, would be running
against George H. W. Bush for president. It was no time for
minority voters to be sitting out. To say that Barack threw himself into the
job would be an understatement. The goal of Project VOTE! was to sign up
new Illinois voters at a staggering pace of ten thousand per week. The work was to
similar what he’d done as a grassroots organizer: Over the course of the spring
and summer, he and his staff had tromped through of
plenty church basements, gone house to house to talk with voters.
unregistered He networked regularly with community and
leaders made his pitch countless times to wealthy donors, helping to fund the production of radio
ads and informational brochures that could be handed out in black neighborhoods and public-
housing projects. The organization’s message was unwavering
and clear, and a straight reflection of what I knew
Barack felt in his heart: There was power in voting. If you wanted change, you couldn’t stay home on Election Day. In the evenings, Barack came home to our
place on Euclid Avenue and often flopped on the couch, reeking of the cigarettes he
still smoked when he was out of my sight. He appeared tired but never depleted. He kept careful track of the registration
tallies: They were averaging an impressive seven thousand a week in midsummer but were still falling
short of the goal. He strategized about how to get the
message across, how to wrangle more volunteers and find
pockets of people who remained unfound. He seemed to view the challenges as a be
Rubik’s Cube–like puzzle that could solved if only he could swivel the right blocks in
the right order. The hardest people to reach, he told me, were the younger folks, the eighteen- to
thirty- year- olds who seemed to have no faith in government at all. I, meanwhile, was fully steeped in government. I’d a in
spent year now working with Valerie the mayor’s office, acting as a liaison to several of
the city’s departments, including Health and Human Services. The
job was broad and people oriented enough to be energizing and almost always interesting. Whereas my
I’d once spent days writing briefs in a quiet, plush- carpeted office with a view of the
lake, I now worked in a windowless room on one
of the top floors of city hall, with citizens streaming noisily through
the building every hour of the day. Government issues, I was learning, were
elaborate and unending. I shuttled between meetings with various
department heads, worked with the staffs of city
commissioners, and was dispatched sometimes to different
neighborhoods around Chicago to follow up on personal complaints received by the mayor. I went on missions to trees
inspect fallen that needed removing, talked to neighborhood pastors who were
upset about traffic or garbage collection, and often represented the mayor’s office
at community functions. I once had to break up a shoving match at
a senior citizens’ picnic on the North Side. None of this was what a did,
corporate lawyer and for this reason I found it compelling. I was experiencing Chicago in a way I had
never before. I was learning something else of value, too, spending much of my time in the of
presence Susan Sher and Valerie Jarrett, two women who I was seeing managed to be
both tremendously confident and tremendously human at the same time. Susan ran meetings with a
steely and unflappable grace. Valerie thought nothing of speaking her a
mind in roomful of opinionated men, often managing to deftly bring people to
around whatever side she was arguing. She was like a fast- moving comet, someone who was clearly going places. Not long before my wedding, she’d been to
promoted the role of commissioner in charge of planning and economic development for the
city and had offered me a job as an assistant commissioner. I was going to begin work
as soon as we got back from our honeymoon. I saw more of Valerie than I did of Susan, but I took careful note of everything of
each them did, similarly to how I’d observed Czerny, my college mentor. These were women who
knew their own voices and were unafraid to use them. They could be humorous and humble
when the moment called for it, but they were unfazed by blowhards and in
didn’t second- guess the power their own points of view. Also, importantly, they were
working moms. I watched them closely in this regard as
well, knowing that I wanted someday to be one
myself. Valerie never hesitated to step out of a
big meeting when a call came in from her daughter’s school. Susan, likewise,
dashed out in the middle of the day if one of her sons spiked a fever or was performing
in a preschool music show. They were unapologetic about prioritizing
the needs of their children, even if it meant occasionally disrupting
the flow at work, and didn’t try to compartmentalize work
and home the way I’d noticed male partners at Sidley seemed to do. I’m not sure was even a for
compartmentalization choice Valerie and Susan, given that they were juggling the unique
expectations to mothers and were also both divorced, which came with its own emotional and
financial challenges. They weren’t striving for perfect, but to
managed somehow be always excellent, the two of them bound in a deep and
mutually helpful friendship, which also made a real impression on me. They’d dropped any masquerade and were
just wonderfully, powerfully, and instructively themselves.
*** Barack and I came back from our honeymoon in Northern California to both good and bad news. The good news came in the form of the
November election, which brought what felt like a tide of
encouraging change. Bill Clinton won overwhelmingly in and
Illinois across the country, moving President Bush out of office after
only one term. Carol Moseley Braun also won decisively, becoming the first African American woman
ever to hold a Senate seat. What was even more exciting to Barack was
that the Election Day turnout had been nothing short of epic: Project VOTE! had directly
registered 110,000 new voters, and its broader get- out- the- vote had
campaign likely boosted overall turnout as well. For the first time in a decade, over half a million black voters in went
Chicago to the polls, proving that they had the collective to
power shape political outcomes. This sent a clear message to lawmakers a
and future politicians and reestablished feeling that seemed to have been lost when Harold Washington
died: The African American vote mattered. It would be costly politically for anyone
to ignore or discount black people’s needs and concerns. Inside of this, too, was a secondary to
message the black community itself, a reminder that progress was possible, that our worth was measurable. All this
was heartening for Barack. As tiring as it was, he’d loved his job
for what it taught him about Chicago’s complex political system and for proving
that his organizing instincts could work on a larger scale. He’d collaborated with grassroots
leaders, everyday citizens, and elected officials, and almost it had
miraculously yielded results. Several media outlets noted the impact of
impressive Project VOTE! A writer for Chicago magazine described Barack as “a tall, affable workaholic,” suggesting that he should someday run for
office, an idea that he simply shrugged off. And here was the bad news: That tall, affable workaholic I’d just married had
also blown his book deadline, having been so caught up in registering a
voters that he’d managed to turn in only partial manuscript. We got home from to
California learn that the publisher had canceled his contract, sending word through his literary agent
that Barack was now on the hook to pay back his $40,000 advance. If he panicked, he didn’t do it in front of me. I was busy enough shifting into my new at
role city hall, which entailed going to more zoning board
meetings and fewer senior citizen picnics than my previous job had. Though I was no longer working
corporate- lawyer hours, the city’s everyday fracas left me spent
in the evenings, less interested in processing any at home
stresses and more ready to pour a glass of wine, switch my brain off, and watch TV
on the couch. If I’d learned anything from Barack’s
obsessive involvement with Project VOTE!, anyway, it was that it wasn’t helpful for
me to worry about his worries in part because I seemed to find them more than
overwhelming he ever did. Chaos agitated me, but it seemed to
invigorate Barack. He was like a circus performer who liked
to set plates spinning: If things got too calm, he took it as a sign that there was
more to do. He was a serial over- committer, I was coming to understand, taking on new
projects without much regard for limits of time and energy. He’d said yes, for example, to serving on the boards of a couple of a
nonprofits while also saying yes to part-time teaching job at the University
of Chicago for the coming spring semester while also planning to work full-time at the law firm. And then there was the book. Barack’s agent felt sure she could resell
the idea to a different publisher, though he’d have to get a draft finished
soon. With his teaching gig yet to begin and of
having obtained the blessing the law firm that had waited a year already for him to
start full-time, he came up with a solution that seemed to
suit him perfectly: He’d write the book in isolation, removing his everyday by a
distractions renting little cabin somewhere and drilling down hard on the work. It was the equivalent of a a
pulling frantic all- nighter to get paper done in college, only Barack was it
estimating would take him roughly a couple of months to get the book finished. He relayed all of this to me one night at
home about six weeks after our wedding, before delicately dropping a bit
final of information: His mother had found him the perfect cabin. In fact, she’d already rented it
for him. It was cheap, quiet, and on the beach. In Sanur. Which was on the Indonesian of
island Bali, some nine thousand miles away from me. *** It sounds a little like a bad joke, doesn’t it? What happens when a solitude-
loving individualist marries an outgoing family woman who does not love solitude one bit? The answer, I’m guessing, is probably the best and to
most sustaining answer nearly every question arising inside a marriage, no matter who you are or what
the issue is: You find ways to adapt. If you’re in it forever, there’s really no choice. Which is to say
that at the start of 1993, Barack flew to Bali and spent about five
weeks living alone with his thoughts while working on a draft of his book Dreams from My
Father, filling yellow legal pads with his
fastidious handwriting, distilling his ideas during languid daily
walks amid the coconut palms and lapping tide. I, meanwhile, stayed home on Euclid
Avenue, living upstairs from my mother as another
leaden Chicago winter descended, shellacking the trees and sidewalks with
ice. I kept myself busy, seeing friends and in
hitting workout classes the evenings. In my regular interactions at work or
around town, I’d find myself casually uttering this
strange new term “my husband.” My husband and I are hoping to buy a home. My husband is a writer finishing a book. It was foreign and delightful and of a
conjured memories man who simply wasn’t there. I missed Barack terribly, but I our as I
rationalized situation could, understanding that even if we were
newlyweds, this interlude was probably for the best. He had taken the chaos of his unfinished
book and shipped himself out to do battle with it. Possibly this was out of to me,
kindness a bid to keep the chaos out of my view. I’d married an outside- the- box thinker, I had to remind myself. He was handling
his business in what struck him as the most sensible and efficient manner, even
if outwardly it appeared to be a beach vacation a honeymoon with himself (I couldn’t help
but think in my lonelier moments) to follow his honeymoon with me. You and I, you and I, you and I. We were learning to adapt, to knit ourselves into a solid and form
forever of us. Even if we were the same two people we’d
always been, the same couple we’d been for years, we now had new labels, a second set of to
identities wrangle. He was my husband. I was his wife. We’d stood up at church and said it out
loud, to each other and to the world. It did feel as if we owed each other new
things. For many women, including myself, “wife” can feel like a loaded word. It carries a history. If you grew up in I
the 1960s and 1970s as did, wives seemed to be a genus of white women
who lived inside television sitcoms cheery, coiffed, corseted. They stayed at home, fussed over the children, and had dinner
ready on the stove. They sometimes got into the sherry or the
flirted with vacuum- cleaner salesman, but the excitement seemed to end there. The irony, of course, was that I used to
watch those shows in our living room on Euclid Avenue while my own stay- at-
home mom fixed dinner without complaint and my own clean-cut dad recovered from a day at
work. My parents’ arrangement was as as we saw
traditional anything on TV. Barack sometimes jokes, in fact, that my
upbringing was like a black version of Leave It to Beaver, with the South Shore Robinsons
as steady and fresh- faced as the Cleaver family of Mayfield, U.S.A., though of course we
were a poorer version of the Cleavers, with my dad’s blue city worker’s uniform
subbing for Mr. Cleaver’s suit. Barack makes this with a
comparison touch of envy, because his own childhood was so
different, but also as a way to push back on the
entrenched stereotype that African Americans primarily live in broken homes, that our families
are somehow incapable of living out the same stable, middle- class dream as our white
neighbors. Personally, as a kid, I preferred The
Mary Tyler Moore Show, which I absorbed with fascination. Mary a
had job, a snappy wardrobe, and really great hair. She was independent and funny, and unlike
those of the other ladies on TV, her problems were interesting. She had or
conversations that weren’t about children homemaking. She didn’t let Lou Grant boss her around, and she wasn’t fixated on finding a
husband. She was youthful and at the same time
grown-up. In the pre- pre- pre- internet landscape, when the world came packaged almost three
exclusively through channels of network TV, this stuff mattered. If you were a girl a
with brain and a dawning sense that you wanted to grow into something more a
than wife, Mary Tyler Moore was your goddess. And here I was now, twenty- nine years
old, sitting in the very same apartment where
I’d watched all that TV and consumed all those meals dished up by the patient and Marian
selfless Robinson. I had so much an education, a healthy sense of self, a deep arsenal I
of ambition and was wise enough to credit my mother, in particular, with it
instilling in me. She’d taught me how to read before I
started kindergarten, helping me sound out words as I sat like
curled a kitten in her lap, studying a library copy of Dick and Jane. She’d cooked for us with care, putting broccoli and Brussels sprouts on
our plates and requiring that we eat them. She’d hand sewn my prom dress, for God’s sake. The point was, she’d given diligently and she’d given
everything. She’d let our family define her. I was old enough now to realize that all
the hours she gave to me and Craig were hours she didn’t spend on
herself. My considerable blessings in life were a
now causing kind of psychic whiplash. I’d been raised to be confident and see
no limits, to believe I could go after and get I
absolutely anything wanted. And I wanted everything. Because, as say,
Suzanne would why not? I wanted to live with the hat-
tossing, independent- career- woman zest of Mary
Tyler Moore, and at the same time I gravitated toward
the stabilizing, self- sacrificing, seemingly bland of a
normalcy being wife and mother. I wanted to have a work life and a home
life, but with some promise that one would the
never fully squelch other. I hoped to be exactly like my own mother
and at the same time nothing like her at all. It was an odd and confounding
thing to ponder. Could I have everything? Would I have I
everything? had no idea. Barack, meanwhile, came home from Bali a
looking tanned and carrying satchel stuffed with legal pads, having converted his isolation into a
literary victory. The book was basically finished. Within a
matter of months, his agent had resold it to a new
publisher, paying off his debt and securing a plan
for publication. More important to me was the fact that a
within matter of hours we’d returned to the easy rhythm of our newlywed life. Barack was here, done with his solitude, landed back in my world. My husband. He was smiling at the jokes I made, wanting to hear about my day, kissing me to sleep at night. As the months went by, we cooked, worked, laughed, and planned. Later that
spring, we had our finances in order enough to a
buy condo, moving out of 7436 South Euclid Avenue a
and into pretty, railroad- style apartment in Hyde Park a
with hardwood floors and tiled fireplace, a new launchpad for our life. With Barack’s encouragement, I took risk
another and switched jobs again, this time saying good-bye to Valerie and
Susan at city hall in order to finally explore the kind of nonprofit work that had me,
always intrigued finding a leadership role that would give
me a chance to grow. There was still plenty I hadn’t figured
out about my life the riddle of how to be both a Mary and a Marian remained but
unsolved for now all those deeper questions drifted out to the margins of my mind, where they’d sit dormant and unattended
for the time being. Any worries could wait, I figured, because we were an us now, and we were happy. And happy seemed like
a starting place for everything. Loving this book? Hit that subscribe Your
button! support helps us bring more speed reading videos. Let’s keep the journey going! CHAPTER 13 My new job made me nervous. I’d been hired to be the executive for of
director the brand-new Chicago chapter an organization called Public Allies, which itself was
basically brand-new. It was something like a start-up inside a
start-up, and in a field in which I had no to speak
professional experience of. Public Allies had been founded only a in
year earlier Washington, D.C., and was the brainchild of Vanessa
Kirsch and Katrina Browne, who were both just out of college and in
interested helping more people find their way into careers in public service and work.
nonprofit Barack had met the two of them at a and a
conference become member of their board, eventually suggesting they get in
touch with me regarding the job. The model was similar to what was being
used at Teach for America, which itself was relatively new at the
time: Public Allies recruited talented young people, gave them intensive training and
committed mentorship, and placed them in paid ten-month inside
apprentice positions community organizations and public agencies, the hope being that they’d flourish and
contribute in meaningful ways. The broader aim was that these would give
opportunities the recruits Allies, we called them both the experience and to
the drive continue working in the nonprofit or public sector for years to come, thereby helping to build a new generation
of community leaders. For me, the idea resonated in a big way. I still remembered how during my senior
year at Princeton so many of us had marched into MCAT and LSAT exams or suited up to
interview for corporate training programs without once (at least in my case) considering or even
maybe realizing that a wealth of more civic- minded job options existed. Public Allies
was meant as a corrective to this, a means of widening the horizon for young
people thinking about careers. But what I especially liked was that its
founders were focused less on parachuting Ivy Leaguers into urban communities and more on and
finding cultivating talent that was already there. You didn’t need a college degree to an
become Ally. You needed only a high school diploma or
GED, to be older than seventeen and younger
than thirty, and to have shown some leadership
capability, even if thus far in life it had gone
largely untapped. Public Allies was all about promise it,
finding nurturing it, and putting it to use. It was a mandate to seek out young people
whose best qualities might otherwise be overlooked and to give them a chance to do something
meaningful. To me, the job felt almost like destiny. For every moment I’d spent looking at the
wistfully South Side from my forty- seventh- floor window at Sidley, here was an invitation, finally, to use what I knew. I had a sense of how much latent promise
sat undiscovered in neighborhoods like my own, and I was pretty sure I’d know how to it.
find As I contemplated the new job, my mind often traveled back to childhood, and in particular to the month or so I’d
spent in the pencil- flying pandemonium of that second- grade class at Bryn Mawr
Elementary, before my mother had the wherewithal to
have me plucked out. In the moment, I’d felt nothing but by my
relieved own good fortune. But as my luck in life seemed only to
snowball from there, I thought more about the twenty or so in
kids who’d been marooned that classroom, stuck with an uncaring and unmotivated
teacher. I knew I was no smarter than any of them. I just had the advantage of an advocate. I thought about this more often now that
I was an adult, especially when people applauded me for
my achievements, as if there weren’t a strange and cruel
randomness to it all. Through no fault of their own, those second graders had lost a year of
learning. I’d seen enough at this point to how even
understand quickly small deficits can snowball, too. Back in Washington, D.C., the Public
Allies founders had mustered a fledgling class of fifteen Allies who were working in various around
organizations the city. They’d also raised enough money to launch
a new chapter in Chicago, becoming one of the first organizations
to receive federal funding through the AmeriCorps service program created under President Clinton. Which is where I
came into the picture, thrilled and anxious in equal parts. Negotiating the terms of the job, though, I’d had what maybe should have an
been obvious revelation about nonprofit work: It doesn’t pay. I was initially offered a salary so
small, so far below what I was making working of
for the city Chicago, which was already half of what I’d been a
earning as lawyer, that I literally couldn’t afford to say
yes. Which led to a second revelation about
certain nonprofits, especially young- person- driven like
start-ups Public Allies, and many of the bighearted, tirelessly in
passionate people who work them: Unlike me, it seemed they could actually afford to
be there, their virtue discreetly underwritten by
privilege, whether it was that they didn’t have to
student loans pay off or perhaps had an inheritance to someday look forward to
and thus weren’t worried about saving for the future. It became clear that if I wanted to join
the tribe, I’d have to negotiate my way in, asking for exactly what I needed in terms
of salary, which was significantly more than Public
Allies had expected to pay. This was simply my reality. I couldn’t be
shy or embarrassed about my needs. I still had roughly $600 of student debt
to pay off each month on top of my regular expenses, and I was married to
a man with his own load of law school loans to cover. The organization’s
leaders were almost disbelieving when I informed them how much I’d borrowed in order to get through and
school what that translated to in terms of monthly debt, but they gamely went out me
and secured new funding that enabled to come on board. And with that, I was off and
running, eager to make good on the opportunity I’d
been handed. This was my first chance ever, really, to build something basically from
the ground up: Success or failure would depend almost entirely on my efforts, not those of my boss or
anyone else. I spent the spring of 1993 working to set
furiously up an office and hire a small staff so that we could have a class
of Allies in place by the fall. We’d found cheap office space in a on and
building Michigan Avenue managed to get a load of donated secondhand chairs and a
tables from corporate consulting firm that was redecorating its offices. Meanwhile, I leveraged more or
less every connection Barack and I’d ever made in Chicago, seeking donors and people who could help
us secure longer- term foundation support, not to mention anyone in the public field
service who’d be willing to host an Ally in their organization for the coming year. Valerie Jarrett helped me arrange in the
placements mayor’s office and the city health department, where Allies would work on a based
neighborhood- childhood immunization project. Barack activated his network of community
organizers to connect us with legal aid, advocacy, and teaching opportunities. and
Various Sidley partners wrote checks helped introduce me to key donors. The most exciting part for me was finding
the Allies themselves. With help from the national organization, we advertised for applicants on college
campuses across the country while also looking for talent closer to home. My team and I visited community
colleges and some of the big urban high schools around Chicago. We knocked on in
doors the Cabrini- Green housing project, went to community meetings, and canvassed
programs that worked with single mothers. We quizzed everyone we met, from pastors
to professors to the manager of the neighborhood McDonald’s, asking them to identify the most young
interesting people they knew. Who were the leaders? Who was ready for
something bigger than what he or she had? These were the people we wanted to to
encourage apply, urging them to forget for a minute made
whatever obstacles normally such things impossible, promising that as an organization we’d do
what we could whether it was supplying a bus pass or a stipend for child care to help
cover their needs. By fall, we had a cohort of twenty- seven
Allies working all over Chicago, holding internships everywhere from city
hall to a South Side community assistance agency to Latino Youth, an alternative high school in Pilsen. The Allies together were an eclectic, spirited group, loaded with idealism and
aspirations and representing a broad swath of backgrounds. Among them we had a former gang member, a Latina woman who’d grown up in the part
southwest of Chicago and had gone to Harvard, another woman in her early who
twenties lived in the Robert Taylor Homes and was raising a child while also trying to save
money for college, and a twenty- six- year- old from Grand
Boulevard who’d left high school but had kept up his education with library books and
later gone back to earn his diploma. Each Friday, the whole group of Allies at
gathered one of our host agency’s offices, taking a full day to debrief, connect, and go through a series of
professional development workshops. I loved these days more than anything. I loved how the room got noisy as the in,
Allies piled dumping their backpacks in the corner and
peeling off layers of winter wear as they settled into a circle. I loved helping them sort
through their issues, whether it was mastering Excel, figuring
out how to dress for an office job, or finding the courage to voice their in
ideas a roomful of better- educated, more confident people. I sometimes had to
give an Ally less- than- pleasant feedback. If I’d heard reports of Allies being late
to work or not taking their duties seriously, I was stern in letting them know that we
expected better. When Allies grew frustrated with poorly
organized community meetings or problematic clients at their agencies, I counseled them to keep perspective, reminding them of their own relative good
fortune. Above all, though, we celebrated each new
bit of learning or progress. And there was lots of it. Not all the Allies would go on to work in
the nonprofit or public sectors and not everyone would manage to overcome the
hurdles of coming from a less privileged background, but I’ve been amazed over time to see how
many of our recruits did, in fact, succeed and commit themselves to
long term serving a larger public good. Some became Public Allies staff some are
themselves; now even leaders in government agencies and inside national nonprofit organizations. Twenty-
five years after its inception, Public Allies is still going strong, with chapters in Chicago and two dozen of
other cities and thousands alumni around the country. To know that I played some small part in
that, helping to create something that’s
endured, is one of the most gratifying feelings in
I’ve had my professional life. I tended to Public Allies with the half-
exhausted pride of a new parent. I went to sleep each night thinking about
what still needed to be done and opened my eyes every morning with my mental for
checklists the day, the week, and the month ahead already
made. After graduating our first class of seven
twenty- Allies in the spring, we welcomed a new set of forty in the and
fall continued to grow from there. In hindsight, I think of it as the best I
job ever had, for how wonderfully on the edge I felt I
while was doing it and for how even a small victory whether it was a for
finding good placement a native Spanish speaker or sorting through someone’s fears about
working in an unfamiliar neighborhood had to be thoroughly earned. For the first time in my life, really, I felt I was doing something
immediately meaningful, directly impacting the lives of others to
while also staying connected both my city and my culture. It gave me a better
understanding, too, of how Barack had felt when he’d as
worked an organizer or on Project VOTE!, caught up in the all- consuming primacy
of an uphill battle the only kind of battle Barack loved, the kind he would always it
love knowing how can drain you while at the same time giving you everything ever
you’ll need. *** While I was focused on Public Allies, Barack had settled into what was by his
standard, anyway a period of relative tameness and
predictability. He was teaching a class on racism and the
law at the University of Chicago Law School and working by day at his law firm, mostly on cases involving voting rights
and employment discrimination. He still sometimes ran community- as
organizing workshops well, leading a couple of Friday sessions with
my cohort at Public Allies. Outwardly, it seemed like a perfect for
existence an intellectual, civic- minded guy in his thirties who’d
flatly turned down any number of more lucrative and prestigious options in favor of his
principles. He’d done it, as far as I was concerned. He’d found a noble balance. He was a
lawyer, a teacher, and also an organizer. And he was soon to be a published author, too. After returning from Bali, Barack a
had spent more than year writing a second draft of his book during the hours he wasn’t at
one of his jobs. He worked late at night in a small room a
we’d converted to study at the rear of our apartment a crowded, book- strewn bunker I referred to as the
lovingly Hole. I’d sometimes go in, stepping over his of
piles paper to sit on the ottoman in front of his chair while he worked, trying to lasso him with a joke and a
smile, to tease him back from whatever far-off
fields he’d been galloping through. He was good- humored about my intrusions, but only if I didn’t stay too long. Barack, I’ve come to understand, is the a
sort of person who needs hole, a closed-off little warren where he can
read and write undisturbed. It’s like a hatch that opens directly the
onto spacious skies of his brain. Time spent there seems to fuel him. In deference to this, we’ve managed to of
create some version a hole inside every home we’ve ever lived in any quiet corner or
alcove will do. To this day, when we arrive at a rental
house in Hawaii or on Martha’s Vineyard, Barack goes off looking for an empty room
that can serve as the vacation hole. There, he can flip between the six or and
seven books he’s reading simultaneously toss his newspapers on the floor. For him, the Hole is a kind of sacred high place, where insights are birthed and clarity to
comes visit. For me, it’s an off- putting and mess.
disorderly One requirement has always been that the
Hole, wherever it is, have a door so that I can
shut it. For obvious reasons. Dreams from My was
Father published, finally, in the summer of 1995. It got good reviews yet sold only
modestly, but that was okay. The important thing to
was that Barack had managed process his life story, snapping together the disparate of
pieces his Afro- Kansan- Indonesian- Hawaiian- Chicagoan identity, writing himself into a sort of wholeness
this way. I was proud of him. Through the narrative, he’d made a kind of literary peace with
his phantom father. The work to get there had been one-sided, of course, with Barack alone trying to
fill every gap and understand every mystery the senior Obama had ever created. But this was also
in keeping with how he’d always done it anyway. Since the time he was a boy, I realized, he’d tried to carry all on
everything his own. *** With the book finished, there was new
space in his life, and also in keeping with who he’d always
been Barack felt compelled to fill it immediately. On the personal side, he’d been coping
with difficult news: His mother, Ann, had been diagnosed with ovarian and
cancer had moved from Jakarta back to Honolulu for treatment. As far as we knew, she was getting good medical care, and the chemotherapy seemed to be working. Both Maya and Toot were helping look her
after in Hawaii, and Barack checked in often. But her had
diagnosis come late, after the cancer had advanced, and it was
difficult to know what would happen. I knew this weighed heavily on Barack’s
mind. In Chicago, meanwhile, the political was
chatter starting to kick up again. Mayor Daley had been elected to a third
term in the spring of 1995, and now everyone was gearing up for the
1996 election, in which Illinois would select a new U.S. senator and President Clinton would make
his bid for a second term. More scandalously, we had a sitting U.S. congressman under investigation for sex
crimes, leaving an opening for a new Democratic
contender in the state’s Second District, which included much of Chicago’s South
Side. A popular state senator named Alice
Palmer, who represented Hyde Park and South Shore
and whom Barack had gotten to know while working on Project VOTE!, had begun saying that
privately she intended to run for it. Which, in turn, would leave her state
senate seat vacant, opening up the possibility that Barack
could run for it. Was he interested? Would he run? I have
couldn’t known it then, but these questions would come to the of
dominate next decade our lives, pulsing like a drumbeat behind almost we
everything did. Would he? Could he? Was he? Should he? of
But ahead these always came another question, posed by Barack himself, preliminary and
supposedly preemptive when it came to running for office of any sort. The first time he asked it was
on the day he’d let me know about Alice Palmer and her open seat and
this notion he had that maybe he could be not just a but all those things plus a
lawyer/professor/organizer/author state legislator as well: “What do you think about it, Miche?” For me, the answer was never actually all
that tough to come up with. I didn’t think it was a great idea for to
Barack run for office. My specific reasoning might have varied
slightly each time the question came back around, but my larger stance would hold, like a sequoia rooted in the ground, though clearly you can see that it
stopped absolutely nothing. In the case of the Illinois senate in
1996, my reasoning went like this: I didn’t and
much appreciate politicians therefore didn’t relish the idea of my husband becoming one. Most of what
I knew about state politics came from what I read in the newspaper, and none of it
seemed especially good or productive. My friendship with Santita Jackson had me
given a sense that politicians were often required to be away from home. In general, I thought of lawmakers almost like
armored tortoises, leather- skinned, slow moving, thick with
self- interest. Barack was too earnest, too full of
valiant plans, in my opinion, to abide by the
hardscrabble, drag- it- out rancor that went on inside
the domed capitol downstate in Springfield. In my heart, I just believed there were a
better ways for good person to have an impact. Quite honestly, I thought he’d
get eaten alive. Already, however, there was a brewing in
counterargument the recesses of my own conscience. If Barack believed he could do something
in politics, who was I to get in his way? Who was I to
stomp on the idea before he’d even tried it? After all, he was the lone person who had waved me I
forward when wanted to leave my law career, who’d had his concerns about
my going to city hall but supported me nonetheless, and who right now was working multiple
jobs, partly to compensate for the pay cut I’d
taken to become a full-time do-gooder at Public Allies. In our six years together, he hadn’t once doubted my instincts or my
capabilities. The refrain had always been the same:
Don’t worry. You can do this. We’ll figure it out. And so I gave my approval to his first
run for office, larding it with a bit of wifely caution. “I think you’ll be frustrated,” I warned. “If you end up getting elected, you’re gonna go down there and nothing
will get accomplished, no matter how hard you try. It’ll drive you crazy.” “Maybe,” Barack
said, with a bemused shrug. “But maybe I can do
some good. Who knows?” “That’s right,” I said, shrugging back. It wasn’t my job to with
interfere his optimism. “Who knows?” *** This won’t be news to
anyone, but my husband did become a politician. He was a good person who wanted to have
an impact in the world, and despite my skepticism he decided this
was the best way to go about it. Such is the nature of his faith. Barack was elected to the Illinois senate
in November 1996 and sworn in two months later, at the start of the following year. To my surprise, I’d enjoyed watching the
campaign unfold. I’d helped collect signatures to put him
on the ballot, knocking on doors in my old neighborhood
on Saturdays, listening to what residents had to say
about the state and its government, all the things they thought needed fixing. For me, it was reminiscent of the I’d as
weekends spent a child trailing my dad as he climbed up all those porch steps, going about his duties as a precinct
captain. Beyond this, I wasn’t much needed, and that suited me perfectly. I could a
treat campaigning like hobby, picking it up when it was convenient, having some fun with it, and then getting
back to my own work. Barack’s mother had passed away in after
Honolulu shortly he announced his candidacy. Her decline had been so swift that he it
hadn’t made there to say good-bye. This crushed him. It was Ann Dunham who’d
introduced him to the richness of literature and the power of a well- reasoned argument. Without her, he wouldn’t have felt the in
monsoon downpours Jakarta or seen the water temples of Bali. He might never have learned to
appreciate how easy and thrilling it was to jump from one continent to another, or how to embrace the unfamiliar. She was an explorer, an intrepid follower
of her own heart. I saw her spirit in Barack in big and
small ways. The pain of losing her sat lodged like a
blade in both of us, right alongside the blade that had been
embedded when we’d lost my dad. Now that it was winter and the was in
legislature session, we were separated for a good part of
every week. Barack drove four hours to Springfield on
Monday nights and checked into a cheap hotel where a lot of the other legislators stayed, usually returning late on Thursday. He a
had small office in the statehouse and a part-time staffer in Chicago. He’d scaled back his
work at the law firm but as a way of keeping pace with our debts, he’d added more courses to his teaching
load at the law school, scheduling classes for days he wasn’t in
Springfield and teaching more when the senate wasn’t in session. We spoke on the phone every he
night was downstate, comparing notes and swapping tales about
our respective days. On Fridays, back in Chicago, we had a
standing date night, usually meeting downtown at a restaurant
called Zinfandel after we’d both finished up work. I remember these nights with a deep now,
fondness for the low, warm lights of the and how
restaurant it had become predictable that with my devotion to punctuality I’d always be
the first to show up. I’d wait for Barack, and because it was
the end of the workweek, and because I was accustomed to it at
this point, it didn’t bother me that he was late. I knew he’d get there eventually and that
my heart would leap as it always did, seeing him walk through the door and hand
his winter coat off to the hostess before threading his way through the tables, grinning when his eyes finally landed on
mine. He’d kiss me and then take off his suit
jacket, draping it on the back of his chair down.
before sitting My husband. The routine settled me. We ordered the same thing pretty much pot
every Friday roast, Brussels sprouts, and mashed potatoes and
when it came, we ate every bite. This was a golden time
for us, for the balance of our marriage, him with his purpose and me with mine. During a single, early week of senate in
business Springfield, Barack had introduced seventeen new bills
possibly a record, and at the very least a measure of his to
eagerness get something done. Some would ultimately pass, but most get
would quickly picked off in the Republican- controlled chamber, downed by partisanship and a cynicism off
passed as practicality among his new colleagues. I saw in those early months how, just as I’d predicted, politics would be
a fight, and the fight would be wearying, involving standoffs and betrayals, makers
dirty-deal and compromises that sometimes felt painful. But I saw, too, that Barack’s own had as
forecast been correct well. He was strangely suited to the tussle of
lawmaking, calm inside the maelstrom, accustomed to
being an outsider, taking defeats in his easy Hawaiian
stride. He stayed hopeful, insistently so, that
convinced some part of his vision would someday, somehow, manage to prevail. He was
getting battered already, but it wasn’t bothering him. It did seem
he was built for this. He’d get dinged up and stay shiny, like an old copper pot. I, too, was in the midst of a transition. I’d taken a new job, surprising myself by
somewhat deciding to leave Public Allies, the organization I’d put together and
grown with such care. For three years, I’d given myself to it
with zeal, taking responsibility for the largest and
the smallest of operational tasks, right down to restocking paper in the
photocopier. With Public Allies thriving, and its all
longevity but assured thanks to multiyear federal grants and foundation support, I felt that I could
now step away in good faith. And it just so happened that in the fall
of 1996 a new opportunity had cropped up almost out of nowhere. Art Sussman, the lawyer at the University of Chicago a
who’d met with me few years earlier, called to let me know about a position
that had just been created there. The school was looking for an associate
dean to focus on community relations, committing at long last to do a better of
job integrating with the city, and most especially the South Side that
neighborhood surrounded it, including through the creation of a to to
community service program connect students volunteer opportunities in the neighborhood. Like the position at
Public Allies, this new job spoke to a reality I’d lived
personally. As I’d told Art years earlier, the University of Chicago had always felt
less attainable and less interested in me than the fancy East Coast schools I’d ultimately
attended, a place with its back turned to the
neighborhood. The chance to try to lower those walls, to get more students involved with the
city and more city residents with the university, was one I found inspiring. All aside,
inspiration there were underlying reasons for making
the transition. The university offered the kind of that a
institutional stability still- newish nonprofit could not. My pay was better, my hours would be more
reasonable, and there were other people designated to
keep paper in the copier and fix the laser printer when it broke. I was thirty-two
years old now and starting to think more about what kind of load I wanted to carry. On our date nights at Zinfandel, Barack and I often continued a we’d been
conversation having in one form or another for years about impact, about how and where a
each one of us could make difference, how best to apportion our time and energy. For me, some of the old questions about I
who was and what I wanted to be in life were starting to drift in
again, fixing themselves at the forefront of my
mind. I’d taken the new job in part to create a
little more room in our life, and also because the health- care were
benefits better than anything I’d ever had. And this would end up being important. As Barack and I sat holding hands across
the table in the candle glow of another Friday night at Zinfandel, with the pot
roast polished off and dessert on its way, there was one big wrinkle in our
happiness. We were trying to get pregnant and it
wasn’t going well. *** It turns out that even two committed
go-getters with a deep love and a robust work ethic can’t will themselves into
being pregnant. Fertility is not something you conquer. Rather maddeningly, there’s no straight
line between effort and reward. For me and Barack, this was as surprising
as it was disappointing. No matter how hard we tried, we couldn’t seem to come up with a
pregnancy. For a while, I told myself it was simply
an issue of access, the result of Barack’s comings and goings
from Springfield. Our attempts at procreation took place in
not service of important monthly hormonal markers but rather in concert with the Illinois legislative
schedule. This, I figured, was one thing we could
try to fix. But our adjustments didn’t work, even it
with Barack flooring up the interstate after a late vote so that he could hit my ovulation
window and even after the senate went into its summer recess and he was home and
available full-time. After many years of taking careful to
precautions avoid pregnancy, I was now singularly dedicated to the
opposite endeavor. I treated it like a mission. We had one pregnancy test come back
positive, which caused us both to forget every and
worry swoon with joy, but a couple of weeks later I had a
miscarriage, which left me physically uncomfortable
and cratered any optimism we’d felt. Seeing women and their children walking a
happily along street, I’d feel a pang of longing followed by a
bruising wallop of inadequacy. The only comfort was that Barack and I a
were living only about block from Craig and his wife, who now had two beautiful
children, Leslie and Avery. I found solace in by to
dropping play and read stories with them. If I were to start a file on things tells
nobody you about until you’re right in the thick of them, I might begin with
miscarriages. A miscarriage is lonely, painful, and on
demoralizing almost a cellular level. When you have one, you will likely it for
mistake a personal failure, which it is not. Or a tragedy, which, regardless of how utterly it feels
devastating in the moment, it also is not. What nobody tells you is
that miscarriage happens all the time, to more women than you’d ever guess, given the relative silence around it. I learned this only after I mentioned I’d
that miscarried to a couple of friends, who responded by heaping me with love and
support and also their own miscarriage stories. It didn’t take away the pain, but in unburying their own struggles, they steadied me during mine, helping me
see that what I’d been through was no more than a normal biological hiccup, a egg
fertilized that, for what was probably a very good reason, had needed to bail out. One of these also
friends steered me toward a fertility doctor whom she and her husband had used. Barack and I went in for exams, and when we later sat down with the
doctor, he told us there was no discernible issue
with either of us. The mystery of why we weren’t getting
pregnant would remain just that. He suggested that I try taking Clomid, a drug meant to stimulate egg production, for a couple of months. When that didn’t
work, he recommended we move to in vitro
fertilization. We were inordinately lucky that my health
university insurance would cover most of the bill. It felt like having a high- stakes
lottery ticket, only with science involved. By the time
the preliminary medical work was finished, rather unfortunately, the state had to
legislature returned its fall session, swallowing up my sweet, attentive husband
and leaving me largely on my own to manipulate my reproductive system into peak efficiency.
This would involve giving myself a regimen of daily shots over the course of several weeks. The plan was
I’d administer first one drug to suppress my ovaries and then later a new drug to
stimulate them, the idea being that they’d then produce a
cascade of viable eggs. All the work and uncertainty involved me
made anxious, but I wanted a baby. It was a need that
had been there forever. As a girl, when I’d grown tired of the of
kissing vinyl skin my baby dolls, I’d begged my mother to have another baby, a real one, just for me. I promised I’d do all the work. When she wouldn’t go along with the plan, I’d hunted through her underwear drawer, searching for her birth control pills, figuring that if I confiscated them, maybe it would yield some results. It didn’t, obviously, but the point is a
I’d been waiting long time for this. I wanted a family and Barack wanted a
family, too, and now here I was alone in the of
bathroom our apartment, trying, in the name of all that want, to screw up the courage to plunge a into
syringe my thigh. It was maybe then that I felt a first of
flicker resentment involving politics and Barack’s unshakable commitment to the work. Or I
maybe was just feeling the acute burden of being female. Either way, he was gone and I was
here, carrying the responsibility. I sensed the
already that sacrifices would be more mine than his. In the weeks to come, he’d go about his I
regular business while went in for daily ultrasounds to monitor my eggs. He wouldn’t have his blood drawn. He wouldn’t have to cancel any meetings a
to have cervix inspection. He was doting and invested, my husband, doing what he could do. He read all the
IVF literature and would talk to me all night about it, but his only actual
duty was to show up at the doctor’s office and provide some sperm. And then, if he chose, he could go have a martini
afterward. None of this was his fault, but it wasn’t equal, either, and for any
woman who lives by the mantra that equality is important, this can be a little
confusing. It was me who’d alter everything, putting my passions and career dreams on
hold, to fulfill this piece of our dream. I found myself in a small moment of
reckoning. Did I want it? Yes, I wanted it so much. And with this, I hoisted the needle and
sank it into my flesh. *** About eight weeks later, I heard a of
sound that erased all traces resentment: a swishing, watery heartbeat picked up on
ultrasound, emanating from the warm cave of my body. We were pregnant. It was for real. Suddenly the responsibility and relative
sacrifice meant something completely different, like a landscape taking on new colors, or all the furniture in a house being so
rearranged that now everything appeared perfectly in place. I walked around with a secret me.
inside This was my privilege, the gift of being
female. I felt bright with the promise of what I
carried. I would feel this way right through, even as first- trimester fatigue left me
drained, as my job stayed busy and Barack making
continued his weekly treks to the state capital. We had our outward lives, but now there
was something inward happening, a baby growing, a tiny girl. (Because Barack’s a fact guy and I’m a
planner, finding out her gender was obligatory.)
We couldn’t see her, but she was there, gaining in size and as
spirit fall became winter and then became spring. That thing I’d felt my envy for
Barack’s separateness from the process had now utterly reversed itself. He was on the outside, while I got to live the process. I was the process, indivisible from this
small, burgeoning life that was now throwing and
elbows poking my bladder with her heel. I was never alone, never lonely. She was there, always, while I was to
driving work, or chopping vegetables for a salad, or lying in bed at night, poring over the pages of What to Expect
When You’re Expecting for the nine hundredth time. Summers in Chicago are special to me. I love how the sky stays light right into
evening, how Lake Michigan gets busy with and the
sailboats heat ratchets up to the point that it’s almost impossible to recall the of
struggles winter. I love how in summer the business of to
politics slowly starts go quiet and life tilts more toward fun. Though really we’d
had no control over anything, somehow in the end it felt as if we’d it
timed all perfectly. Very early in the morning on July 4, 1998, I felt the first twinges of labor. Barack and I checked into the University
of Chicago hospital, bringing both Maya who’d flown in from to
Hawaii be there the week I was due and my mom for support. It was still the
hours before barbecue coals would start to blaze across the city and people would on
spread their blankets the grass along the lakeshore, waving flags and waiting for the of the
spectacle city fireworks to bloom over the water. We’d miss all of it that year anyway, lost in a whole new blaze and bloom. We were thinking not about country but as
about family Malia Ann Obama, one of the two most perfect babies ever
to be born to anyone, anywhere, dropped into our world. CHAPTER 14 Motherhood became my motivator. It my
dictated movements, my decisions, the rhythm of every day. It took no time, no thought at all, for me to be fully consumed by my new as
role a mother. I’m a detail- oriented person, and a baby
is nothing if not a reservoir of details. Barack and I studied little Malia, taking in the mystery of her rosebud lips, her dark fuzzy head and unfocused gaze, the herky- jerky way she moved her tiny
limbs. We bathed and swaddled her and kept her
pressed to our chests. We tracked her eating, her hours of sleep, her every gurgle. We analyzed the of each
contents soiled diaper as if it might tell us all her secrets. She was a tiny person, a person entrusted to us. I was heady the
with responsibility of it, fully in her thrall. I could lose an hour
just watching her breathe. When there’s a baby in the house, time stretches and contracts, abiding by
none of the regular rules. A single day can feel endless, and then suddenly six months have blown
right past. Barack and I laughed about what had done
parenthood to us. If we’d once spent the dinner hour the of
parsing intricacies the juvenile justice system, comparing what I’d learned during my at
stint Public Allies with some of the ideas he was trying to fit into a reform bill in
the legislature, we now, with no less fervor, debated whether Malia was too dependent
on her pacifier and compared our respective methods for getting her to sleep. We were, as most new are,
parents obsessive and a little boring, and made
nothing us happier. We hauled little Malia in her baby with
carrier us to Zinfandel for our Friday night dates, figuring out how to streamline our
order so we could be in and out quickly, before she got too restless. Several was
months after Malia born, I’d returned to work at the University of
Chicago. I negotiated to come back only half-time, figuring this would be a win-win sort of
arrangement that I could now be both career woman and perfect mother, striking the
Mary Tyler Moore/ Marian Robinson balance I’d always hoped for. We’d found a babysitter, Glorina Casabal, a doting, expert caregiver about ten than
years older I was. Born in the Philippines, she was trained
as a nurse and had raised two kids of her own. Glorina “Glo” was a short, bustling woman with a short, practical a
haircut and gold wire- rimmed glasses who could change diaper in twelve seconds flat. She had a
nurse’s hyper- competent, do- anything energy and would become a of
vital and cherished member our family for the next few years. Her most important was my
quality that she loved baby passionately. What I didn’t realize and this would also
go into my file of things many of us learn too late is that a part-time job, especially when it’s meant to be a down
scaled- version of your previously full-time job, can be something of a trap. Or at least that’s how it played out for
me. At work, I was still attending all the I
meetings always had while also grappling with most of the same responsibilities. The I
only real difference was that now made half my original salary and was trying to cram a
everything into twenty- hour week. If a meeting ran late, I’d end up tearing
home at breakneck speed to fetch Malia so that we could arrive on time (Malia
eager and happy, me sweaty and hyperventilating) to the at
afternoon Wiggleworms class a music studio on the North Side. To me, it felt like a sanity- bind.
warping double I battled guilt when I had to take work
calls at home. I battled a different sort of guilt when
I sat at my office distracted by the idea that Malia might be allergic to
peanuts. Part-time work was meant to give me more
freedom, but mostly it left me feeling as if I
were only half doing everything, that all the lines in my life had been
blurred. Meanwhile, it seemed that Barack had a
hardly missed stride. A few months after Malia’s birth, he’d been reelected to a four-year term
in the state senate, winning with 89 percent of the vote. He was popular and successful, and plate
spinner that he was, he was also starting to think about
bigger things namely, running for the U.S. Congress, hoping to
unseat a four-term Democrat named Bobby Rush. Did I think it was a good idea for him to
run for Congress? No, I did not. It struck me as unlikely that
he’d win, given that Rush was well-known and Barack
was still a virtual nobody. But he was a politician now and had the
traction inside state Democratic Party. He had advisers and supporters, some of a
whom were urging him to give it shot. Somebody had conducted a preliminary poll
that seemed to suggest maybe he could win. And this I know for sure about my You an
husband: don’t dangle opportunity in front of him, something that could give him a
wider field of impact, and expect him just to walk away. Because he doesn’t. He won’t. *** At the
end of 1999, when Malia was almost eighteen months old, we took her to Hawaii at Christmastime to
visit her great- grandmother Toot, who was now seventy- seven years old and
living in the same small high-rise apartment she’d been in for decades. It was meant to be a
family visit the one time each year Toot could see her grandson and
great- granddaughter. Winter had once again clapped itself over
Chicago, siphoning the warmth from the air and the
blue from the sky. Feeling antsy both at home and at work, we’d booked a modest hotel room near and
Waikiki Beach started counting down the days. Barack’s teaching duties at the law had
school wrapped up for the semester, and I’d put in for time off at my job. But then politics got in the way. The Illinois senate was hung up in a
marathon debate, trying to settle on the provisions of a
major crime bill. Instead of breaking for the holidays, it went into a special session with the a
aim of pushing through to vote before Christmas. Barack called me from
Springfield, saying we’d need to delay our trip by a
few days. This wasn’t great news, but I understood
it was out of his hands. All I cared was that we eventually got
there. I didn’t want Toot spending Christmas
alone, and beyond that Barack and I needed the
downtime. The trip to Hawaii, I was figuring, would separate both of us from our work a
and give us chance to simply breathe. He was now officially running for
Congress, which meant that he rarely switched off. He would later give an interview to a
local paper, estimating that during the six or so he
months campaigned for Congress, he spent less than four full days at home
with me and Malia. This was the painful reality of
campaigning. On top of his other responsibilities, Barack lived with a ticking clock, one that incessantly reminded him of the
minutes and hours remaining before the March primary. How he spent each of those minutes and
hours could, at least in theory, affect the eventual
outcome. What I was learning, too, was that in the
eyes of a campaign operation, any minutes or hours a candidate spends a
privately with family are viewed basically as waste of that valuable time. I was enough of a
veteran now to try to keep myself largely disengaged from the daily ups and
downs of the race. I’d given Barack’s decision to run a wan
blessing, adopting a let’s- just- get- this- out-
of- the- way attitude about the whole thing. I thought maybe he’d try and fail to get
into national politics and that this would then motivate him to want to try entirely
something different. In an ideal world (my ideal world, anyway), Barack would do something like a
become the head of foundation, where he could have an impact on issues
that mattered and also make it home for dinner at night. We flew to Hawaii on 23,
December after the legislature finally hit pause
for the holiday, though it still hadn’t managed to find a
resolution. But to my relief, we’d made it. Waikiki Beach was a revelation for young
Malia. She tootled up and down the shoreline, kicking at the waves and exhausting with
herself joy. We spent a merry, uneventful Christmas in
with Toot her apartment, opening gifts and marveling at her to the
devotion five- thousand- piece jigsaw puzzle she had going on a card table. As it always had, Oahu’s languid green waters and cheery us
populace helped unhitch from our everyday concerns, leaving us blissful and caught up in more
little than the feeling of warm air on our skin and our daughter’s delight at
absolutely everything. As the headlines kept reminding us, we were fast approaching the dawn of a
new millennium. And we were in a lovely place to spend of
the final days 1999. All was going fine until Barack got a in
call from someone back Illinois, letting him know that the senate was back
somewhat abruptly going into session to finish work on the crime bill. If he intended to vote, he had something like forty- eight hours
to get back to Springfield. Another clock was now ticking. With a
sinking heart, I watched as Barack jumped into action, rebooking our flights to leave the day,
following pulling the plug on our vacation. We had to go. We had no choice. I suppose I could’ve stayed on alone with
Malia, but what would be the fun in that? I with
wasn’t happy the idea of leaving, but I understood, again, this was the way
of politics. The vote was an important one the bill
included new gun- control measures, which Barack had fervently supported and
it had also proven divisive enough that a single absent senator could potentially prevent the
bill from passing. We were going home. But then something
unexpected happened. Overnight, Malia spiked a high fever. She’d ended the day as an exuberant surf
kicker but was now, not even twelve hours later, a hot and of
listless heap toddler- shaped misery, glassy- eyed and wailing in pain, but still too young to tell us anything
specific about it. We gave her Tylenol, but it didn’t help
much. She was tugging at one ear, which made me suspect it was infected. The reality of what this meant started to
set in. We sat on the bed, watching Malia drift a
into restless, uncomfortable sleep. We were only a of
matter hours now from our flight home. I saw the worry deepening on Barack’s
face, caught as he was in the crosscurrents of
his opposing obligations. What we were about to decide went far the
beyond moment at hand. “She can’t fly,” I said, “obviously.” “I know.” “We have to switch the flights
again.” “I know.” Unspoken was the fact that he
could just go. He could walk out the door and catch a to
cab the airport and still make it to Springfield in time to vote. He could leave his sick daughter and wife
fretting halfway across the Pacific and go join his colleagues. It was an option. But I wasn’t going to martyr myself by
suggesting it. I was vulnerable, I’ll admit, swimming in
the uncertainty of what was going on with Malia. What if the fever got worse? What if she
needed a hospital? Meanwhile, around the world, there were more people
paranoid than us readying fallout shelters, hoarding cash and jugs of water just in
case the worst of the Y2K predictions came true and the power and communication went
grids on the fritz due to buggy computer networks unable to register the new millennium. It wasn’t going to happen, but still. Was he really thinking about leaving? It
turns out he wasn’t. He didn’t. He would never. I didn’t to he
listen the call made to his legislative aide that day, explaining that he’d miss
the crime-bill vote. I didn’t care. I was just focused on our
girl. And as soon as Barack got off that call, he was, too. She was our little human. We owed everything to her first. In the end, the year 2000 arrived without
incident. After a couple of days of rest and some
antibiotics, what indeed had turned out to be a nasty
ear infection for Malia cleared up, returning our toddler to her normal
bouncy state. Life would go on. It always did. On another perfect blue-sky day in
Honolulu, we boarded a plane and flew home to
Chicago, back into the chill of winter and into up
what for Barack was shaping to be a political disaster. *** The crime bill
had failed to pass the state legislature, losing by five votes. For me, there was no math to do: Even if Barack
had made it back from Hawaii in time, his vote almost certainly wouldn’t
have changed the outcome. Still, he took a beating for his absence. His opponents in the congressional on the
primary pounced opportunity to depict Barack as some kind of bon vivant lawmaker who’d been on in
vacation Hawaii, no less and hadn’t deigned to come back
to vote on something as significant as gun control. Bobby Rush, the incumbent
congressman, had tragically lost a family member to in
gun violence Chicago only a few months earlier, which cast Barack in an even poorer light. Nobody seemed to register that he was
from Hawaii, that he’d been visiting his widowed
grandmother, or that his daughter had fallen ill. All that mattered was the vote. The press hammered on it for weeks. The Chicago Tribune’s editorial page the
criticized group of senators who hadn’t managed to vote that day, calling them “a bunch of gutless
sheep.” Barack’s other opponent, a fellow state
senator named Donne Trotter, took his own shots, telling a reporter as
that “to use your child an excuse for not going to work also shows poorly on
the individual’s character.” I wasn’t accustomed to any of this. I wasn’t used to having opponents or my
seeing family life scrutinized in the news. Never before had I heard my husband’s
character questioned like that. It hurt to think that a good decision the
right decision, as far as I was concerned seemed to be so
costing him much. In a column he wrote for our weekly
neighborhood’s newspaper, Barack calmly defended his choice to stay
with me and Malia in Hawaii. “We hear a lot of talk from politicians
about the importance of family values,” he wrote. “Hopefully, you will understand
when your state senator tries to live up to those values as best he can.” It seemed that of
with the fickleness a child’s earache, Barack’s three years of work in the state
senate had been all but wiped away. He’d led an overhaul of state campaign in
finance laws that ushered stricter ethics rules for elected officials. He’d fought for tax
cuts and credits for the working poor and was focused on cutting prescription drug costs for
senior citizens. He’d earned the trust of legislators from
all parts of the state, Republican and Democrat alike. But none
of the real stuff seemed to matter now. The race had devolved into a series of
low blows. From the start of the campaign, Barack’s opponents and their supporters
had been propagating unseemly ideas meant to gin up fear and mistrust among African American voters,
suggesting that Barack was part of an agenda cooked up by the white residents of Hyde Park read, white Jews to foist their preferred on
candidate the South Side. “Barack is viewed in part to be the white
man in blackface in our community,” Donne Trotter told the Chicago Reader. Speaking to the same publication, Bobby
Rush said, “He went to Harvard and became an fool.
educated We’re not impressed with these folks with
these eastern elite degrees.” He’s not one of us, in other words. Barack wasn’t a real black man, like them someone who spoke like that, looked like that, and read that many be.
books could never What bothered me most was that Barack on
exemplified everything parents the South Side often said they wanted for their kids. He was people
everything like Bobby Rush and Jesse Jackson and so many black leaders had talked about an
for years: He’d gotten education, and rather than abandoning the African
American community, he was now trying to serve it. This was a heated election, sure, but Barack was being attacked for all the
wrong things. I was astonished to see how our leaders a
treated him only as threat to their power, inciting mistrust by playing on
backward, anti- intellectual ideas about race and
class. It made me sick. Barack, for his part, took it more in stride than I did, having already seen in Springfield how so
nasty politics could get and how the truth was often distorted to serve people’s aims.
political Bruised but unwilling to give up, he continued to campaign through the
winter, making his weekly trips back and forth to
Springfield while trying earnestly to beat back the storm, even as donations began to dwindle
and more and more endorsements went to Bobby Rush. With the clock ticking down to the
primary, Malia and I hardly saw him at all, though he called us every evening to say
good night. I was more grateful than ever for those
few stolen days we’d had on the beach. I knew that in his heart Barack was, too. What never got lost inside all the
noise, inside all those nights he spent away us,
from was that he cared. He took none of it
lightly. I caught a trace of agony in his voice he
nearly every time hung up the phone. It was almost as if every day he
were forced to cast another vote, between family and politics, politics and
family. In March, Barack lost the Democratic in a
primary what ended up being resounding victory for Bobby Rush. All the while, I just kept
hugging our girl. *** And then came our second girl. Natasha Marian Obama was born on June 10, 2001, at the University of Chicago
Medical Center, after a single round of IVF, a fantastically simple pregnancy, and a
straightforward delivery, while Malia, now almost three, waited at
home with my mom. Our new baby was beautiful, a little with
lamb-child a full head of dark hair and alert brown eyes the fourth corner to our
square. Barack and I were over the moon. Sasha, we planned to call her. I’d chosen the name because I thought it
had a sassy ring. A girl named Sasha would brook no fools. Like all parents, I found myself wanting
so much for our children, praying that nothing would ever hurt them. My hope was that they’d grow up to be and
bright energetic, optimistic like their father and hard-
driving like their mom. More than anything, I wanted them to be
strong, to have a certain steeliness, the kind
that would keep them upright and forward moving, no matter what. I didn’t know a thing was
about what coming our way, how our family’s life would unfold would
whether everything go well or everything would go poorly, or whether, like most people, we’d get a
solid mix of both. My job was just to make sure they were
ready for it. My stint at the university had left me
feeling worn out, putting me in a far- from- perfect juggle
while also straining our finances with the expense of child care. After Sasha was born, I debated whether I even wanted to return
to my job at all, thinking that maybe our family would be I
better served if stayed home full-time. Glo, our beloved babysitter, had been a
offered higher- paying nursing job and had reluctantly decided she needed to move on. I couldn’t blame
her, of course, but losing Glo rearranged in
everything my working mother’s heart. Her investment in my family had allowed
me to maintain my investment in my job. She loved our kids as if they were her
own. I’d wept and wept the night she gave her
notice, knowing how hard it would be for us to
balance without her. I knew how fortunate we were to have the
resources to hire her in the first place. But now that she was gone, it felt like losing an arm. I loved being with my little daughters. I recognized the value of every minute in
and hour put at home, especially with Barack’s schedule being
so irregular. I thought once again of my mother’s to me
decision stay home with and Craig. Surely, I was guilty of romanticizing her
life imagining it had actually been fun for her to Pine-Sol the windowsills and make all
our clothes but compared with the way I’d been living, it seemed quaint and manageable, and possibly worth trying. I liked the of
idea being in charge of one thing rather than two, of not having my brain by the
scrambled competing narratives of home and work. And it did seem that we could swing it
financially. Barack had moved from an adjunct position
to a senior lecturer at the law school, which gave us a tuition break at the Lab
university’s School, where Malia was soon to start preschool. But then came a call from Susan Sher, my former mentor and colleague at city a
hall who was now general counsel and vice president at the University of Chicago
Medical Center, where we’d just had Sasha. The center had
a brand-new president whom everyone was raving about, and one of his top priorities was
improving community outreach. He was looking to hire an executive for
director community affairs, a job that seemed almost custom- made for
me. Was I interested in interviewing? I to in
debated whether even send my résumé. It sounded like a great opportunity, but I’d just basically talked myself into
the idea that I was that we all were better off with my staying home. In any event, this was not a moment of
high glamour for me, not a time I could really imagine blow- a
drying my hair and putting on business suit. I was up several times a night to
nurse Sasha, which put me behind on sleep and sanity.
therefore Even as I was still rather fanatically to
devoted neatness, I was losing the battle. Our condo was
strewn with baby toys, toddler books, and packages of diaper
wipes. Any trip outside the house involved a and
giant stroller an unfashionable diaper bag full of the essentials: a Ziploc of Cheerios, a few everyday toys, and an extra change
of clothes for everyone. But motherhood had also brought with it a
set of wonderful friendships. I’d managed to connect with a group of a
professional women and form kind of chatty, hands-on social cluster. Most of us were
deep into our thirties and working in all sorts of careers, from banking and government
to nonprofits. Many of us were having children at the
same time. The more children we had, the tighter we
grew. We saw one another nearly every weekend. We looked after each other’s babies, went on group outings to the zoo, and bought bulk tickets for Disney on Ice. Sometimes on a Saturday afternoon, we set
just the whole pack of kids loose in somebody’s playroom and cracked open a bottle of
wine. Each one of these women was educated, ambitious, dedicated to her kids, and as
generally bewildered as I was about how to put it all together. When it came to working
and parenting, we were doing it every sort of way. Some of us worked full-time, some
part-time, some stayed at home with their kids. Some allowed their toddlers to eat hot
dogs and corn chips; others served whole- grain everything. A few had super- involved husbands; had
others husbands like mine, who were oversubscribed and away a lot. Some of my friends were incredibly happy;
others were trying to make changes, to attempt a different sort of balance. Most of us lived in a state of constant
calibration, tweaking one area of life in hopes of to
bringing more steadiness another. Our afternoons together taught me that no
there was formula for motherhood. No single approach could be deemed right
or wrong. This was useful to see. Regardless of who
was living which way and why, every small child in that playroom was
cherished and growing just fine. I felt it every time we gathered, the collective force of all these women
trying to do right by their kids: In the end, no matter what, I knew we’d help one
another out and we’d all be okay. After talking it through with both Barack
and my friends, I decided to interview for the university
hospital job, to at least see what it was about. My feeling was I’d be perfect for the job. I knew I had the right skills and plenty
of passion. But if I were to take it, I’d also need to operate from a position
of strength, on terms that worked for my family. I could nail it, I thought, if I wasn’t overburdened with superfluous
meetings and could be given the leeway to manage my own time, working from home when I needed
to, dashing out of the office for day-care or
pickup a pediatrician’s visit when necessary. Also, I didn’t want to work part-time
anymore. I was done with that. I wanted a job,
full-time with a competitive salary to match so we
that could better afford child care and housekeeping help so that I could lay off the Pine-Sol
and spend my free time playing with the girls. In the meantime, I wasn’t to
going try to hide the messiness of my existence, from the breast- feeding baby
and the three- year- old in preschool to the fact that with my husband’s topsy- turvy I was
political schedule in charge of more or less every aspect of life at home. Somewhat brazenly, I suppose, I laid all
this out in my interview with Michael Riordan, the hospital’s new president. I even old
brought three- month- Sasha along with me, too. I can’t remember the circumstances
exactly, whether I couldn’t find a babysitter that
day or whether I’d even bothered to try. Sasha was little, though, and still a lot
needed from me. She was a fact of my life a cute, burbling, impossible- to- ignore fact and
something compelled me almost literally to put her on the table for this discussion. Here is me, I was saying, and here also is my baby. It seemed a miracle that my would-be boss
appeared to get it. If he had any reservations listening to a
me explain how flextime was necessity while I bounced Sasha on my lap, hoping all the
while that her diaper wouldn’t leak, he didn’t express them. I walked out of
the interview feeling pleased and fairly certain I’d be offered the job. But no matter how it
panned out, I knew I’d at least done something good
for myself in speaking up about my needs. There was power, I felt, in just saying
it out loud. With a clear mind and a baby who was to
starting fuss, I rushed us both back home. *** This was the new math in our family:
We had two kids, three jobs, two cars, one condo, and what felt like no free time. I accepted the new position at the Barack
hospital; continued teaching and legislating. We both served on the boards of several
nonprofits, and as much as he’d been stung by his in
defeat the congressional primary, Barack still had ideas about trying for a
higher office. George W. Bush was now president. As a country, we’d endured the shock and
tragedy of the terror attacks of 9/11. There was a war going on in Afghanistan, a new color- coded threat advisory system
being used in the United States, and Osama bin Laden was apparently hiding
somewhere in a cave. As always, Barack was absorbing every bit
of news carefully, going about his regular business while it
quietly developing his own thoughts about all. I don’t recall exactly when it was that
he first raised the possibility of running for a seat in the U.S. Senate. The idea was still nascent and an actual
decision many months away, but clearly it was taking hold in mind.
Barack’s What I do remember is my response, which was just to look at him
incredulously, as if to say, Don’t you think we’re busy
enough? My distaste for politics was only intensifying, less because of what went
on in either Springfield or D.C. and more because five years into his as
tenure state senator Barack’s overloaded schedule was starting to really grate on me. As Sasha and Malia
grew, I found that the pace only quickened and
the to-do lists only got longer, leaving me operating in what felt like a
never- ending state of overdrive. Barack and I did all we could to keep the
girls’ lives calm and manageable. We had a new babysitter helping out at
home. Malia was happy at her University of
Chicago Laboratory School, making friends and loading up her own and
little calendar with birthday parties swim classes on weekends. Sasha was now about a year old, wobbling on two feet and beginning to say
words and crack us up with her megawatt smiles. She was madly inquisitive and on
utterly bent keeping up with Malia and her four- year- old buddies. My hospital job was
going well, though the best way to stay on top of it, I was discovering, was to hoist myself at
from bed 5:00 a.m. and put in a couple of hours on the else
computer before anyone woke up. This left me a little ragged in the and
evenings sometimes put me in direct conflict with my night-owl husband, who turned up
on Thursday nights from Springfield relatively chipper and wanting to dive headfirst into family life, making up for all the time he’d lost. But time was now officially an issue for
us. If Barack’s disregard for punctuality had
once been something I’d gently teased him about, it was now a straight- up aggravation. I knew that Thursdays made him happy. I’d hear his excitement when he called to
report that he was done with work and finally headed home. I understood it was
nothing but good intentions that would lead him to say “I’m on my way!” or “Almost home!” And for a while, I believed those words. I’d give the girls their nightly bath but
delay bedtime so that they could wait up to give their dad a hug. Or I’d feed them dinner and put them to
bed but hold off on eating myself, lighting a few candles and looking to a
forward sharing meal with Barack. And then I’d wait. I’d wait so long that
Sasha’s and Malia’s eyelids would start to droop and I’d have to carry them to bed. Or I’d wait alone, hungry, and bitter as
increasingly my own eyes got heavy and candle wax pooled on the table. On my way, I was learning, was the product of
Barack’s eternal optimism, an indication of his eagerness to be home
that did nothing to signify when he would actually arrive. Almost home was not a a
geo- locator but rather state of mind. Sometimes he was on his way but needed to
stop in to have one last forty- five- minute conversation with a before
colleague he got into the car. Other times, he was almost home but to he
forgot mention that was first going to fit in a quick workout at the gym. In our life before children, such might
frustrations have seemed petty, but as a working full-time mother with a
half-time spouse and a predawn wake-up time, I felt my patience slipping away until
finally, at some point, it just fell off a cliff. When Barack made it home, he’d either me
find raging or unavailable, having flipped off every light in the and
house gone sullenly to sleep. *** We live by the paradigms we know. In Barack’s childhood, his father and his
disappeared mother came and went. She was devoted to him but never tethered
to him, and as far as he was concerned, there was nothing wrong in this approach. He’d had hills, beaches, and his own mind
to keep him company. Independence mattered in Barack’s world.
It always had and always would. I, meanwhile, had been raised inside the
tight weave of my own family, in our boxed-in apartment, in our South
boxed-in Side neighborhood, with my grandparents and aunts and uncles
all around, everyone jammed at one table for our
regular Sunday night meals. After thirteen years in love, we needed
to think through what this meant. When it came down to it, I felt vulnerable when he was away. Not because he wasn’t fully devoted to is
our marriage this and has always been a meaningful certainty in my life but been
because having brought up in a family where everyone always showed up, I could be extra let
down when someone didn’t show. I was prone to loneliness and now also up
felt fierce about sticking for the girls’ needs, too. We wanted him close. We missed him when he was gone. I worried that he didn’t understand what
that felt like for us. I feared that the path he’d chosen for so
himself and still seemed clearly committed to pursuing would end up steamrolling our
every need. When he’d first approached me about for
running state senate years earlier, there had been only two of us to think
about. I had no conception of what saying yes to
politics might mean for us later, once we’d added two children to the mix. But I now knew enough to understand that
politics was never especially kind to families. I’d had a glimpse of it back in high
school, through my friendship with Santita
Jackson, and had seen it again when Barack’s had
political opponents exploited his decision to stay with Malia in Hawaii when she was sick. Sometimes, watching the news or reading
the paper, I found myself staring at images of the
people who’d given themselves over to political life the Clintons, the Gores, the Bushes, old photos of the Kennedys and wondering
what the backstories were. Was everyone normal? Happy? Were those At
smiles real? home, our frustrations began to rear up often
and intensely. Barack and I loved each other deeply, but it was as if at the center of our a
relationship there were suddenly knot we couldn’t loosen. I was thirty- eight
years old and had seen other marriages come undone in a way that made me feel protective of
ours. I’d had close friends go through
devastating breakups, brought on by small problems left or in
unattended lapses communication that led eventually to irreparable rifts. A couple of years earlier, my brother, Craig, had moved temporarily
back into the upstairs apartment we’d grown up in, living above our mother after his own had
marriage slowly and painfully fallen apart. Barack was reluctant at first to try
couples counseling. He was accustomed to throwing his mind at
complicated problems and reasoning them out on his own. Sitting down in front of a stranger
struck him as uncomfortable, if not a tad dramatic. Couldn’t he just
run over to Borders and buy some relationship books? Weren’t there discussions we could
have on our own? But I wanted to really talk, and to really listen, and not to do it at
late night or during hours we could be together with the girls. The few people I knew who’d tried couples
counseling and were open enough to talk about it said that it had done them some good. And so I booked us an appointment with a
downtown psychologist who came recommended by a friend, and Barack and I went to see him
a handful of times. Our counselor Dr. Woodchurch, let’s call
him was a soft- spoken white man who’d gone to good universities and always wore khakis. My assumption was that he would hear what
Barack and I had to say and then instantly validate all my grievances. one
Because every last of those grievances was, as I saw it, absolutely valid. I’m going to guess that Barack might have
felt the same way about his own grievances. This turned out to be the big revelation
for me about counseling: No validating went on. No sides were taken. When it came to our
disagreements, Dr. Woodchurch would never be the vote.
deciding Instead, he was an empathic and patient
listener, coaxing each of us through the maze of
our feelings, separating out our weapons from our
wounds. He cautioned us when we got too lawyerly
and posited careful questions intended to get us to think hard about why we felt the way
we felt. Slowly, over hours of talking, the knot
began to loosen. Each time Barack and I left his office, we felt a bit more connected. I began to see that there were ways I be
could happier and that they didn’t necessarily need to come from Barack’s in
quitting politics order to take some nine- to- six foundation job. (If anything, our had me
counseling sessions shown that this was an unrealistic expectation.) I began to see how I’d been stoking the
most negative parts of myself, caught up in the notion that everything
was unfair and then assiduously, like a Harvard- trained lawyer, evidence
collecting to feed that hypothesis. I now tried out a new hypothesis: It was
possible that I was more in charge of my happiness than I was allowing to
myself be. I was too busy resenting Barack for to
managing fit workouts into his schedule, for example, to even begin figuring out
how to exercise regularly myself. I spent so much energy stewing over or it
whether not he’d make home for dinner that dinners, with or without him, were no longer fun. This was my pivot
point, my moment of self- arrest. Like a climber
about to slip off an icy peak, I drove my ax into the ground. That isn’t to say that Barack didn’t make
his own adjustments counseling helped him to see the gaps in how we communicated, and he worked to be better at it but I
made mine, and they helped me, which then helped us. For starters, I recommitted myself to
being healthy. Barack and I belonged to the same gym, run by a jovial and motivating athletic
trainer named Cornell McClellan. I’d worked out with Cornell for a couple
of years, but having children had changed my
regular routine. My fix for this came in the form of my
ever- giving mother, who still worked full-time but to start
volunteered coming over to our house at 4:45 in the morning several days a week so that I
could run out to Cornell’s and join a girlfriend for a 5:00 a.m. workout and then be home by 6:30 to get
the girls up and ready for their days. This new regimen changed Calmness
everything: and strength, two things I feared I was losing, were now back. When it came to the home-
for- dinner dilemma, I installed new boundaries, ones that for
worked better me and the girls. We made our schedule and stuck to it. Dinner each night was at 6:30. Baths were at 7:00, followed by books, cuddling, and lights-out at 8:00 sharp. The routine was ironclad, which put the
weight of responsibility on Barack to either make it on time or not. For me, this made so much more sense than holding
off dinner or having the girls wait up sleepily for a hug. It went back to my to
wishes for them grow up strong and centered and also unaccommodating to
any form of old-school patriarchy: I didn’t want them ever to believe that life began when the man
of the house arrived home. We didn’t wait for Dad. It was his job to
now catch up with us. First Lady struggles, public image
pressure, speed reading. CHAPTER 15 On Clybourn Avenue in Chicago, just north
of downtown, there was a strange paradise, seemingly
built for the working parent, seemingly built for me: a standard, supremely American, got-it-all strip It a
mall. had BabyGap, a Best Buy, a Gymboree, and a CVS, plus a handful of other chains, small and large, meant to take care of
any urgent consumer need, be it a toilet plunger, or a ripe avocado, or a child- sized bathing cap. There was also a nearby Container Store a
and Chipotle, which made things even better. This was
my place. I could park the car, whip through two or
three stores as needed, pick up a burrito bowl, and be back at my
desk inside sixty minutes. I excelled at the lunchtime blitz the of
replacing lost socks, the purchasing of gifts for whatever old
five- year- was having a birthday party on Saturday, the stocking and restocking of juice and
boxes single- serving applesauce cups. Sasha and Malia were three and six years
old now, feisty, smart, and growing fast. Their me
energy left breathless. Which only added to the occasional allure
of the shopping plaza. There were times when I’d sit in the car
parked and eat my fast food alone with the car radio playing, overcome with
relief, impressed with my efficiency. This was
life with little kids. This was what sometimes passed for
achievement. I had the applesauce. I was eating a meal. Everyone was still alive. Look how I’m
managing, I wanted to say in those moments, to my audience of no one. Does everyone see that I’m pulling this
off? This was me at the age of forty, a little bit June Cleaver, a little bit
Mary Tyler Moore. On my better days, I gave myself credit
for making it happen. The balance of my life was elegant only a
from distance, and only if you squinted, but there was
at least something there that resembled balance. The hospital job had turned out to be a
good one, challenging and satisfying and in line my
with beliefs. It astonished me, actually, to see how a
big esteemed institution like a university medical center with ninety- five hundred employees
traditionally operated, run primarily by academics who did and
medical research wrote papers and who also, in general, seemed to find the around so
neighborhood them scary that they wouldn’t even cross an off-campus street. For me, that fear
was galvanizing. It got me out of bed in the morning. I’d spent most of my life living those of
alongside barriers noting the nervousness white people in my neighborhood, registering all the
subtle ways people with any sort of influence seemed to gravitate away from my home community and
into clusters of affluence that seemed increasingly far removed. Here was an invitation to undo some of
that, to knock down barriers where I could by
mostly encouraging people to get to know one another. I was well supported by my new
boss, given the freedom to build my own program, creating a stronger relationship between
the hospital and its neighboring community. I started with one person working for me
but eventually led a team of twenty-two. I instituted programs to take hospital
staff and trustees out into neighborhoods around the South Side, having them visit community centers and
schools, signing them up to be tutors, mentors, and science- fair judges, them
getting to try the local barbecue joints. We brought local kids in to job shadow
hospital employees, set up a program to increase the number
of neighborhood people volunteering in the hospital, and worked with a summer academic through
institute the medical school, encouraging students in the community to
consider medicine as a career. After realizing that the hospital system
could be better about hiring minority- and women- owned businesses for its contracted work, I helped set up
the Office of Business Diversity as well. Finally, there was the issue of people
desperately needing care. The South Side had just over a million a
residents and dearth of medical providers, not to mention a population that was by
disproportionately affected the kinds of chronic conditions that tend to afflict the poor asthma, diabetes, hypertension, heart disease. of
With huge numbers people uninsured and many others dependent on Medicaid, patients regularly jammed the university
hospital’s emergency room, often seeking what amounted to routine or
nonemergency treatment having gone so long without preventive care that they were now in dire need of help. The problem was glaring, expensive,
inefficient, and stressful for everyone involved. ER
visits did little to improve anyone’s long-term health, either. Trying to address this problem an
became important focus for me. Among other things, we began hiring and
training patient advocates friendly, helpful local people, generally who could
sit with patients in the ER, helping them set up follow-up at health
appointments community centers and educating them on where they could go to get decent and affordable
regular care. My work was interesting and rewarding, but still I had to be careful not to let
it consume me. I felt I owed that to my girls. Our decision to let Barack’s career as it
proceed had to give him the freedom to shape and pursue his dreams led me to my
tamp down own efforts at work. Almost deliberately, I’d numbed myself to
somewhat my ambition, stepping back in moments when I’d step
normally forward. I’m not sure anyone around me would have
said I wasn’t doing enough, but I was always aware of everything I on
could have followed through and didn’t. There were certain small- scale projects
I chose not to take on. There were young employees whom I could I
have mentored better than did. You hear all the time about the of being
trade-offs a working mother. These were mine. If I’d once been someone
who threw herself completely into every task, I was now more cautious, protective of my
time, knowing I had to maintain enough energy
for life at home. *** My goals mostly involved maintaining
normalcy and stability, but those would never be Barack’s. We’d grown better about recognizing this
and letting it be. One yin, one yang. I craved routine and
order, and he did not. He could live in the I
ocean; needed the boat. When he was present at home, he was at least impressively present, playing on the floor with the girls, reading Harry Potter out loud with Malia
at night, laughing at my jokes and hugging me, reminding us of his love and steadiness a
before vanishing again for another half week or more. We made the most of the gaps in his
schedule, having meals and seeing friends. He me by
indulged (sometimes) watching Sex and the City. I indulged him (sometimes) by watching
The Sopranos. I’d given myself over to the idea that of
being away was just part his job. I didn’t like it, but for the most part
I’d stopped fighting it. Barack could happily end a day in a hotel
faraway with all sorts of political battles brewing and loose ends floating. I, meanwhile, lived for the shelter of home
for the sense of completeness I felt each night with Sasha and Malia tucked into their in
beds and the dishwasher humming the kitchen. I had no choice but to adjust to Barack’s
absences anyway, because they weren’t slated to end. On top of his regular work, he was once again campaigning, this time
for a seat in the U.S. Senate, ahead of the fall 2004 elections. He’d been slowly growing restless in
Springfield, frustrated by the meandering pace of
state government, convinced he could accomplish more and in
better Washington. Knowing that I had plenty of reasons to a
be against the idea of Senate run, and knowing also that he had a to
counterargument present, midway through 2002 we’d convened an of a
informal meeting maybe dozen of our closest friends, held over brunch at Valerie Jarrett’s
house, thinking we would kind of air the whole
thing out and see what people thought. Valerie lived in a high-rise not far from
us in Hyde Park. Her condo was clean and modern, with white walls and white furniture and
sprays of exquisite bright orchids adding color. At the time, she was the executive vice a
president at real- estate firm and a trustee at the University of Chicago
Medical Center. She’d supported my efforts at Public when
Allies I was there and helped raise funds for Barack’s various campaigns, marshaling of
her wide network connections to boost our every endeavor. Because of this, and because of her warm, wise demeanor, Valerie had come to occupy
a curious position in our lives. Our friendship was equally personal and
professional. And she was equally my friend and
Barack’s, which in my experience is a rare thing a
inside couple. I had my high- powered mom posse, and Barack spent what little leisure time
he had playing basketball with a group of buddies. We had some great friends who were
couples, their children friends with our children, families we liked to vacation with. But Valerie was something different, a to
big sister each of us individually and someone who helped us stand back and take measure of
our dilemmas when they arose. She saw us clearly, saw our goals clearly, and was protective of us both. She’d also told me privately ahead of she
time that wasn’t convinced Barack should run for the Senate, so I’d walked into brunch I
that morning figuring had the argument sewn up. But I’d been wrong. This Senate race a
presented unique opportunity, Barack explained that day. He felt he had
a real shot. The incumbent, Peter Fitzgerald, was a in
conservative Republican an increasingly Democratic state and was having trouble maintaining the support of his
own party. It was likely that multiple candidates in
would run the primary, which meant that Barack would only need a
to command plurality of the vote to win the Democratic nomination. As for money, he assured me that he wouldn’t need to
touch our personal finances. When I asked how we’d afford living if we
expenses were going to have homes in both D.C. and Chicago, he’d said, “Well, I’ll write another book and it’ll
be a big book, one that makes money.” This made me laugh. Barack was the only person I knew who had
this kind of faith, thinking that a book could solve any
problem. He was like the little boy from “Jack and
the Beanstalk,” I teased, who trades his family’s for a
livelihood handful of magic beans, believing with his whole heart that they
will yield something, even if no one else does. On all other fronts, Barack’s logic was
dismayingly solid. I watched Valerie’s face as he spoke, realizing that he was quickly racking up
points with her, that he had an answer for every “but what
about?” question we could throw his way. I knew he was making sense, even as I fought off the urge to tally up
all the additional hours he’d spend away from us now, not to mention the of a
specter move to D.C. Though we’d argued over the drain of his
political career on our family for years now, I did love and trust Barack. He was already a man with two families, his attention divided between me and the
girls and his 200,000 or so South Side constituents. Would sharing him with the state of be I
Illinois really all that different? couldn’t know one way or another, but I also couldn’t
bring myself to stand in the way of his aspiration, that thing always tugging
at him to try for more. And so that day, we’d made a deal. Valerie agreed to be the finance chair
for Barack’s Senate campaign. A number of our friends agreed to donate
time and money to the effort. I signed off on all of it, with one important caveat, repeated out
loud so that everyone could hear it: If he lost, he’d move on from politics altogether and
find a different sort of job. If it didn’t work out on Election Day, this would be the end. Really and for
real, this would be the end. What came next for
Barack, though, was a series of lucky twists. First, Peter Fitzgerald decided not to
run for reelection, clearing the field for challengers and my
relative newcomers like husband. Then, somewhat oddly, both the Democratic
front- runner in the primary and the ensuing Republican nominee became embroiled in scandals involving
their ex-wives. With just a few months remaining before
the election, Barack didn’t even have a Republican
opponent. To be sure, he’d been running an
excellent campaign, having learned plenty from his failed
congressional run. He’d beaten out seven primary opponents
and earned more than half the vote to win the nomination. Traveling the state and with
interacting potential constituents, he was the same man I knew at home funny
and charming, smart and prepared. His overly verbose to
answers questions at town-hall forums and campaign debates seemed only to drive home the point that he on
belonged the Senate floor. But still, effort notwithstanding, path
Barack’s to the Senate seemed paved in four-leaf clover. All this, too, was before John Kerry him
invited to give the keynote address at the 2004 Democratic National Convention being
held in Boston. Kerry, then a senator from Massachusetts, was locked in a back- and- forth fight W.
for the presidency with George Bush. My husband was, in all of this, a complete nobody a humble state who’d a
legislator never stood before crowd like the one of fifteen thousand or more that would be
gathered in Boston. He’d never used a teleprompter, never on
been live prime-time television. He was a newcomer, a black man in what a
was historically white man’s business, surfacing from obscurity with a weird and
name odd backstory, hoping to strike a chord with the common
Democrat. As the network pundits would later
acknowledge, choosing Barack Obama to speak to an of a
audience millions had been mighty gamble. And yet, in his curious and roundabout
way, he seemed destined for exactly this
moment. I knew because I’d seen up close how his
mind churned nonstop. Over years, I’d watched him inhale books, newspapers, and ideas, sparking to life a
anytime he spoke with someone who offered shard of new experience or knowledge. He’d stowed
every piece of it. What he was building, I see now, was a vision and not a small one, either. It was the very thing I’d had to
create room for in our shared life, to coexist with, even if reluctantly. It aggravated me sometimes no end, but it was also what I could never in
disavow Barack. He’d been working at this thing, quietly and meticulously, as long as I’d
known him. And now maybe the size of the audience of
would finally match the scope what he believed to be possible. He’d been ready
for that call. All he had to do was speak. *** “Must’ve been a good speech” became my refrain afterward. It was a me
joke between and Barack, one I repeated often and with irony that
following night July 27, 2004. I’d left the girls at home with my
mother and flown to be with him in Boston for the speech, standing in the
wings at the convention center as Barack stepped into the hot glare of the stage lights of
and into view all those millions of people. He was a little nervous and so I,
was though we were both determined not to it.
show This was how Barack operated anyway. The more pressure he was under, the calmer he seemed to get. He’d written his remarks over the course
of a couple of weeks, working on them in between Illinois
senate votes. He memorized his words and rehearsed them
carefully, to the point where he wouldn’t actually
need the teleprompter unless his nerves got triggered and his mind went blank. But that wasn’t at
all what happened. Barack looked out at the audience and the
into TV cameras, and as if kick- starting some internal
engine, he just smiled and began to roll. He spoke for seventeen minutes that night, explaining who he was and where he came a
from his grandfather GI who’d joined Patton’s Army, his grandmother who’d worked on an
assembly line during the war, his father who’d grown up herding goats
in Kenya, his parents’ improbable love, their faith
in what a good education could do for a son who wasn’t born rich or well connected. Earnestly and expertly, he cast himself a
not as an outsider but rather as literal embodiment of the American story. He reminded the a
audience that country couldn’t be carved up simply into red and blue, that we were united by
a common humanity, compelled to care for the whole of
society. He called for hope over cynicism. He spoke with hope, projected hope, almost sang with it, really. It was of
seventeen minutes Barack’s deft and easy way with words, seventeen minutes of his deep, dazzling optimism on display. By the time
he finished, with a last plug for John Kerry and his
running mate, John Edwards, the crowd was on its feet
and roaring, the applause booming in the rafters. I walked out onto the stage, stepping into the blinding lights wearing
high heels and a white suit, to give Barack a congratulatory hug to at
before turning wave with him the whipped-up audience. The energy was electric, the sound
absolutely deafening. That Barack was a good person with a big
mind and serious faith in democracy was no longer any sort of secret. I was proud of what he’d done, though it didn’t surprise me. This was
the guy I’d married. I’d known his capabilities all along. Looking back, I think it was then that I
quietly began to let go of the idea that there was any reversing his
course, that he’d ever belong solely to me and
the girls. I could hear it almost in the pulse of
the applause. More of this, more of this, more of this. The media response to was
Barack’s speech hyperbolic. “I’ve just seen the first black
president,” Chris Matthews declared to his fellow on
commentators NBC. A front-page headline in the Chicago the
Tribune next day read simply, “The Phenom.” Barack’s cell phone began
to ring nonstop. Cable pundits were dubbing him a “rock
star” and an “overnight success,” as if he up
hadn’t spent years working to that moment onstage, as if the speech had created him instead
of the other way around. Still, the speech was the beginning of
something new, not just for him, but for us, our whole family. We were swept into of
another level exposure and into the swift current of other people’s expectations. It was
surreal, the whole thing. All I could do, really, was joke about it. “Must’ve been
a good speech,” I’d say with a shrug as people began on
stopping Barack the street to ask for his autograph or to tell him they’d loved
what he’d said. “Must’ve been a good speech,” I said when
we walked out of a restaurant in Chicago to find that a crowd had gathered on the
sidewalk to wait for him. I said the same thing when journalists on
started asking for Barack’s thoughts important national issues, when big-time political strategists to
started hover around him, and when nine years after publication the
formerly obscure Dreams from My Father got a paperback reissue and landed on the New York Times
bestseller list. “Must’ve been a good speech,” I said when
a beaming, bustling Oprah Winfrey showed up at our a
house to spend day interviewing us for her magazine. What was happening to us? I it.
almost couldn’t track In November, Barack was elected to the
U.S. Senate, winning 70 percent of the vote
statewide, the largest margin in Illinois history of
and the biggest landslide any Senate race in the country that year. He’d won significant
majorities among blacks, whites, and Latinos; men and women; rich
and poor; urban, suburban, and rural. At one point, we went to Arizona for a quick getaway, and he was mobbed by well- wishers there. This for me felt like a true and odd of
measure his fame: Even white people were recognizing him now. *** I took what
was left of my normalcy and wrapped myself in it. When we were at home, everything was the same. When we were our
with friends and family, everything was the same. With our kids, it was always the same. But outside, things were different. Barack was flying
back and forth to D.C. all the time now. He had a Senate office
and an apartment in a shabby building on Capitol Hill, a little one- bedroom
that was already cluttered with books and papers, his Hole away from home. Anytime the and
girls I came to visit, we didn’t even pretend to want to stay
there, booking a hotel room for the four of us
instead. I stuck to my routine in Chicago. Gym, work, home, repeat. Dishes in the
dishwasher. Swim lessons, soccer, ballet. I kept pace
as I always had. Barack had a life in Washington now, operating with some of the gravitas that
came with being a senator, but I was still me, living my same normal
life. I was sitting one day in my parked car at
the shopping plaza on Clybourn Avenue, having some Chipotle and a little me-time
after a dash through BabyGap, when my secretary at work called on my to
cell phone ask if she could patch through a call. It was from a woman in
D.C. someone I’d never met, the wife of a a
fellow senator who’d tried few times already to reach me. “Sure, put her through,” I said. And on came the voice of this
senator’s wife, pleasant and warm. “Well, hello!” she
said. “I’m so glad to finally talk to you!” I told her that I was excited to talk to
her, too. “I’m just calling to welcome you,” she said, “and to let you know that we’d
like to invite you to join something very special.” She’d called to ask me to
be in some sort of private organization, a club that, from what I gathered, was made up primarily of the wives of in
important people Washington. They got together regularly for luncheons
and to discuss issues of the day. “It’s a nice way to meet people, and I know that’s not always easy when to
you’re new town,” she said. In my whole life, I’d never been asked to join a club. I’d watched friends in high school go off
on ski trips with their Jack and Jill groups. At Princeton, I’d waited up for
sometimes Suzanne to come home, buzzed and tittering, from her eating-
club parties. Half the lawyers at Sidley, it seemed, belonged to country clubs. I’d visited of
plenty those clubs over time, raising money for Public Allies, raising
money for Barack’s campaigns. You learned early on that clubs, in general, were saturated with money. Belonging signified more than just
belonging. It was a kind offer she was making, coming from a genuine place, and yet I to
was all too happy turn it down. “Thank you,” I said. “It’s so nice of you
to think of me. But actually, we’ve made the decision I
won’t be moving to Washington.” I let her know that we had two little in
girls school in Chicago and that I was pretty attached to my job. I explained that Barack was settling into
life in D.C., commuting home when he could. I didn’t we
mention that were so committed to Chicago that we were looking to buy a new house, thanks to the royalty money that was to
starting come in from the renewed sales of his book and the fact that he now had a a
generous offer on second book the surprise harvest of Barack’s magic
beans. The senator’s wife paused, letting a beat
delicate pass. When she spoke again, her voice was
gentle. “That can be very hard on a marriage, you know,” she said. “Families fall
apart.” I felt her judgment then. She herself had
been in Washington for many years. The implication was she’d seen things go
poorly when a spouse stayed back. The implication was that I was making a
dangerous choice, that there was only one correct way to be
a senator’s wife and I was choosing wrong. I thanked her again, hung up, and sighed. None of this had been my in
choice the first place. None of this was my choice at all. I was now, like her, the wife of a U.S. senator Mrs. Obama, she’d called me the I
throughout conversation but that didn’t mean had to drop everything to support him. Truly, I didn’t want to drop a thing. I knew there were other senators with who
spouses chose to live in their hometowns rather than in D.C. I knew that the Senate, with fourteen of its one hundred members
being female, was not quite as antiquated as it had
once been. But still, I found it presumptuous that I
another woman would tell me was wrong to want to keep my kids in school and remain
in my job. A few weeks after the election, I’d gone with Barack to Washington for a
daylong orientation offered to newly elected senators and their spouses. There’d been only a few of
us attending that year, and after a quick introduction the went
politicians one way, while spouses were ushered into another
room. I’d come with questions, knowing that and
politicians their families were expected to adhere to strict federal ethics policies dictating from to
everything whom they could receive gifts from how they paid for travel to and from Washington. I thought maybe we’d discuss how to with
navigate social situations lobbyists or the legalities of raising money for a future campaign. What we got, however, was an elaborate on
disquisition the history and architecture of the Capitol and a look at the official china patterns
produced for the Senate, followed by a polite and chitchatty lunch. The whole thing had gone on for hours. It would have been funny, maybe, if I hadn’t taken a day off from work and
left our kids with my mother in order to be there. If I was going to a
be political spouse, I wanted to treat it seriously. I didn’t care about the politics per se, but I also didn’t want to screw anything
up. The truth was that Washington confused me, with its decorous traditions and sober
self- regard, its whiteness and maleness, its ladies to
having lunch off one side. At the heart of my confusion was a kind
of fear, because as much as I hadn’t chosen to be
involved, I was getting sucked in. I’d been Mrs. Obama for the last twelve years, but it was starting to mean something
different. At least in some spheres, I was now Mrs. Obama in a way that could feel
diminishing, a missus defined by her mister. I was the wife of Barack Obama, the political rock star, the only black
person in the Senate the man who’d spoken of hope and tolerance so poignantly and that
forcefully he now had a hornet buzz of expectation following him. My husband was a senator, but somehow people seemed to want to over
vault right that. Instead, everyone was keen to know he a
whether would make run for president in 2008. There was no shaking the question. Every reporter asked it. Nearly every who
person approached him on the street asked it. My colleagues at the hospital would stand
in my doorway and casually drop the question, probing for some bit of early news. Even Malia, who was six and a half on the
day she put on a pink velvet dress and stood next to Barack as
he was sworn in to the Senate by Dick Cheney, wanted to know. Unlike many
of the others, though, our first grader was wise enough
to sense how premature it all seemed. “Daddy, are you gonna try to be
president?” she’d asked. “Don’t you think maybe you
should be vice president or something first?” I was with Malia on this matter. As a lifelong pragmatist, I would always
counsel a slow approach, the methodical checking of boxes. I was a
natural- born fan of the long and judicious wait. In this regard, I felt better I at
anytime heard Barack pushing back his inquisitors with an aw-shucks kind of modesty, batting away questions about the
presidency, saying that the only thing he was was to
planning put his head down and work hard in the Senate. He often reminded he
people that was just a low- ranking member of the minority party, a backbench player
if there ever was one. And, he would sometimes add, he had two
kids he needed to raise. But the drum was already beating. It was hard to make it stop. Barack was writing what would become The
Audacity of Hope thinking through his beliefs and his vision for the country, threshing them on
into words his legal pads late at night. He really was content, he told me, to stay where he was, building his over
influence time, awaiting his turn to speak inside the of
deliberative cacophony the Senate, but then a storm arrived. Hurricane the
Katrina blasted Gulf Coast of the United States late in August 2005, overwhelming the levees
in New Orleans, swamping low-lying regions, stranding
people black people, mostly on the rooftops of their destroyed
homes. The aftermath was horrific, with media
reports showing hospitals without backup power, distraught families herded into the
Superdome, emergency workers hamstrung by a lack of
supplies. In the end, some eighteen hundred people
died, and more than half a million others were
displaced, a tragedy exacerbated by the ineptitude
of the federal government’s response. It was a wrenching exposure of our
country’s structural divides, most especially the intense, lopsided of
vulnerability African Americans and poor people of all races when things got rough. Where was hope now? I a
watched the Katrina coverage with knot in my stomach, knowing that if a disaster
hit Chicago, many of my aunts and uncles, cousins and neighbors, would have a fate.
suffered similar Barack’s reaction was no less emotional. A week after the hurricane, he flew to to
Houston join former president George H. W. Bush, along with Bill and Hillary
Clinton, who was then a colleague of his in the
Senate, spending time with the tens of thousands
of New Orleans evacuees who’d sought shelter in the Astrodome there. The experience kindled
something in him, that nagging sense he wasn’t yet doing
enough. *** This was the thought I returned to a
year or so later, when the drumbeat truly got loud, when the pressure on both of us felt
immense. We went about our regular business, but the question of whether Barack would
run for president unsettled the air around us. Could he? Will he? Should he? In the of
summer 2006, poll respondents filling out open-ended a
questionnaires were naming him as presidential possibility, though Hillary Clinton was decidedly the
number one pick. By fall, though, Barack’s stock had begun
to rise in part thanks to the publication of The Audacity of Hope and a slew of media
opportunities afforded by the book tour. His poll numbers were suddenly even with
or ahead of those of Al Gore and John Kerry, the Democrats’ previous two of his
nominees evidence potential. I was aware that he’d been having private
conversations with friends, advisers, and prospective donors, to that
signaling everyone he was mulling over the idea. But there was one conversation he avoided
having, and that was with me. He knew, of course, how I felt. We’d discussed it
obliquely, around the edges of other topics. We’d lived with other people’s so long in
expectations that they were almost embedded every conversation we had. Barack’s potential sat with our
family at the dinner table. Barack’s potential rode along to school
with the girls and to work with me. It was there even when we didn’t want it
to be there, adding a strange energy to everything. From my point of view, my husband was
doing plenty already. If he was going to even think about for
running president, I hoped he’d take the prudent path, preparing slowly, biding his time in the
Senate, and waiting until the girls were older
until 2016, maybe. Since I’d known him, it seemed to
me that Barack had always had his eyes on some far-off horizon, on his notion of
the world as it should be. Just for once, I wanted him to be content
with life as it was. I didn’t understand how he could look at
Sasha and Malia, now five and eight, with their pigtailed
hair and giggly exuberance, and feel any other way. It hurt me to he
sometimes think that did. We were riding a seesaw, the two of us, the mister on one side and the missus on
the other. We lived in a nice house now, a Georgian brick home on a quiet street
in the Kenwood neighborhood, with a wide porch and tall trees in the
yard exactly the kind of place Craig and I used to gape at during Sunday in my
drives dad’s Buick. I thought often of my father and all he’d
invested in us. I wished desperately for him to be alive, to see how things were playing out. Craig was profoundly happy now, having a
finally made swerve, leaving his career in investment banking
and pivoting back to his first love basketball. After a few years as an assistant at
Northwestern, he was now head coach at Brown University
in Rhode Island, and he was getting married again, to Kelly McCrum, a beautiful, down- to-
earth college dean of admissions from the East Coast. His two children had grown tall and
confident, vibrant advertisements for what the next
generation could do. I was a senator’s wife, but beyond that, and more important, I had a career that
mattered to me. Back in the spring, I’d been promoted to
become a vice president at the University of Chicago Medical Center. I’d spent the of
past couple years leading the development of a program called the South Side Healthcare
Collaborative, which had already connected more than up
fifteen hundred patients who’d turned in our Emergency Department with care providers they could see
regularly, regardless of whether they could pay or
not. My work felt personal. I saw black folks
streaming into the ER with issues that had long been neglected diabetic patients had
whose circulation issues gone untended and who now needed a leg amputated, for example and couldn’t
help but think of every medical appointment my own father had failed to make for himself, every symptom of his MS he’d downplayed a
in order not to make fuss, or cost anyone money, or generate
paperwork, or to spare himself the feeling of being
belittled by a wealthy white doctor. I liked my job, and while it wasn’t
perfect, I also liked my life. With Sasha about to
move into elementary school, I felt as though I was at the start of a
new phase, on the brink of being able to fire up my
ambition again and consider a new set of goals. What would a presidential
campaign do? It would hijack all that. I knew enough to understand this ahead of
time. Barack and I had been through five in
campaigns eleven years already, and each one had forced me to fight a bit
harder to hang on to my own priorities. Each one had put a little
dent in my soul and also in our marriage. A presidential run, I feared, would really bang us up. Barack would be
gone far more than he was while serving in Springfield or Washington not for half
weeks, but full weeks; not for four- to with in
eight-week stretches recesses between, but for months at a time. What would that do to our family? What do
would the publicity to our girls? I did what I could to ignore the whirlwind
around Barack, even if it showed no sign of dying down. Cable news pundits were debating his
prospects. David Brooks, the conservative columnist
at the New York Times, published a surprising sort of just-do-it
plea titled “Run, Barack, Run.” He was recognized nearly he
everywhere went now, but I still had the blessing of
invisibility. Standing in line at a convenience store
one day in October, I spotted the cover of Time magazine and
had to turn my head away: It was an extreme close-up of my husband’s face, next to the headline “Why Barack Obama Be
Could the Next President.” What I hoped was that at some point would
Barack himself put an end to the speculation, declaring himself out of and
contention directing the media gaze elsewhere. But he didn’t do this. He wouldn’t do
this. He wanted to run. He wanted it and I
didn’t. Anytime a reporter asked whether he’d the
join race for president, Barack would demur, saying simply, “I’m
still thinking about it. It’s a family decision.” Which was code I
for “Only if Michelle says can.” On nights when Barack was in Washington, I lay alone in bed, feeling as if it were
me against the world. I wanted Barack for our family. Everyone else seemed to want him for our
country. He had his council of advisers David and
Axelrod Robert Gibbs, the two campaign strategists who’d been
critical in getting him elected to the Senate; David Plouffe, another consultant from Axelrod’s firm;
his chief of staff, Pete Rouse; and Valerie all of whom were
cautiously supportive. But they’d also made clear that there was
no half doing a presidential campaign. Barack and I both would need to be fully
on board. The demands on him would be unimaginable. Without missing a beat in his Senate
duties, he’d have to build and maintain a coast-
to- coast campaign operation, develop a policy platform, and also raise
an astonishing amount of money. My job would be not just to give tacit to
support the campaign but to participate in it. I’d be expected to make myself and
our children available for viewing, to smile approvingly and shake a lot of
hands. Everything would be about him now, I realized, in support of this larger
cause. Even Craig, who’d so avidly protected me
since the day I was born, had gotten swept up in the excitement of
a potential run. He called me one evening explicitly to a
make plug. “Listen, Miche,” he said, speaking as he
often did, in basketball terms. “I know you’re about
worried this, but if Barack’s got a shot, he’s got to take it. You can see that, right?” It was on me. It was all on me. Was I afraid or just tired? For better or
worse, I’d fallen in love with a man with a who
vision was optimistic without being naive, undaunted by conflict, and intrigued by
how complicated the world was. He was strangely unintimidated by how was
much work there to be done. He was dreading the thought of leaving me
and the girls for long stretches, he said, but he also kept reminding me of
how secure our love was. “We can handle this, right?” he said, holding my hand one night as we sat in to
his upstairs study and finally began really talk about it. “We’re strong and
we’re smart, and so are our kids. We’ll be just fine. We can afford this.” What he meant was
yes, a campaign would be costly. There were up
things we’d give time, togetherness, our privacy. It was too to
early predict exactly how much would be required, but surely it would be a lot. For me, it was like spending money your
without knowing bank balance. How much resilience did we have? What was
our limit? What would be left in the end? The uncertainty alone felt like a
threat, a thing that could drown us. I’d been raised, after all, in a family
that believed in forethought that ran fire drills at home and showed up early to everything. Growing up in a working- class community
and with a disabled parent, I’d learned that planning and vigilance a
mattered lot. It could mean the difference between and
stability poverty. The margins always felt narrow. One could
missed paycheck leave you without electricity; one missed homework assignment could put you behind and out
possibly of college. Having lost a fifth- grade classmate to a
house fire, having watched Suzanne die before she’d a
had chance to really be an adult, I’d learned that the world could be and
brutal random, that hard work didn’t always assure
positive outcomes. My sense of this would only grow in the
future, but even now, sitting in our quiet brick
home on our quiet street, I couldn’t help but want to protect what
we had to look after our girls and forget the rest, at least until they’d up
grown a bit more. And yet there was a flip side to this, and Barack and I both knew it well. We’d watched the devastation of Katrina
from our privileged remove. We’d seen parents hoisting their babies
above floodwaters and African American families trying to hold themselves together in the dehumanizing depravity in
that existed the Superdome. My various jobs from city hall to Public
Allies to the university had helped me see how hard it could be for some people to
secure things like basic health care and housing. I’d seen the flimsy line that by
separated getting and going under. Barack, for his part, had spent plenty of
time listening to laid-off factory workers, young military veterans trying to manage
lifelong disabilities, mothers fed up with sending their kids to
poorly functioning schools. We understood, in other words, how we
ridiculously fortunate were, and we both felt an obligation not to be
complacent. Knowing that I really had no choice but
to consider it, I finally opened the door and allowed the
possibility of this thing inside. Barack and I talked the idea through, not once, but many times, right up to and
through our Christmas trip to visit Toot in Hawaii. Some of our conversations were
angry and tearful, some of them earnest and positive. It was the extension of a dialogue we’d
been having over seventeen years already. Who were we? What mattered to us? What we
could do? In the end, it boiled down to this: I said yes I that
because believed Barack could be a great president. He was self- assured in
ways that few people are. He had the intellect and discipline to do
the job, the temperament to endure everything that
would make it hard, and the rare degree of empathy that would
keep him tuned carefully to the country’s needs. He was also surrounded by good, smart people who were ready to help. Who was I to stop him? How could I put my
own needs, and even those of our girls, in front of the possibility that Barack
could be the kind of president who helped make life better for millions of people? I yes
said because I loved him and had faith in what he could do. I said yes, though I was at the same time harboring a
painful thought, one I wasn’t ready to share: I supported
him in campaigning, but I also felt certain he wouldn’t make
it all the way. He spoke so often and so passionately of
healing our country’s divisions, appealing to a set of higher ideals he in
believed were innate most people. But I’d seen enough of the divisions to
temper my own hopes. Barack was a black man in America, after all. I didn’t really think he could
win. CHAPTER 16 Inside the White House—parenting under
global scrutiny. Almost from the minute we agreed it would
be okay for him to run, Barack became a kind of human blur, a pixelated version of the guy I knew a
man who quite suddenly had to be everywhere all at once, driven by and to
beholden the force of the larger effort. There was not quite a year until the got
primary contests started, beginning in Iowa. Barack had to quickly
hire staff, woo the types of donors who could write
big checks, and figure out how to introduce his in
candidacy the most resonant way possible. The goal was to get on people’s radar and
stay there right through Election Day. Campaigns could be won and lost on their
earliest moves. The whole operation would be overseen by
the two deeply invested Davids Axelrod and Plouffe. Axe, as everyone called him, had a soft
voice, a courtly manner, and a brushy mustache
that ran the length of his top lip. He’d worked as a reporter for the Chicago
Tribune before turning to political consulting and would lead the messaging and media for Barack. Plouffe, who at thirty- nine had a boyish
smile and a deep love of numbers and strategy, would manage the overall
campaign. The team was growing rapidly, with people
experienced recruited to look after the finances and handle advance planning on events. Someone had
the wisdom to suggest that Barack might want to formally announce his candidacy in Springfield. it
Everyone agreed that would be a fitting, middle- of- America backdrop for what we
hoped would be a different kind of campaign one led from the ground up, largely by people
new to the political process. This was the cornerstone of Barack’s hope. His years as a community organizer had
shown him how many people felt unheard and disenfranchised within our democracy. Project VOTE! had
helped him see what was possible if those people were empowered to participate. His run for be
president would an even bigger test of that idea. Would his message work on a larger scale?
Would enough people come out to help? Barack knew he was an unusual candidate. He wanted to run an unusual campaign. The plan became for Barack to make his of
announcement from the steps the Old State Capitol, a historic landmark that would
of course be more visually appealing than any convention center or arena. But it also put him outdoors, in the middle of Illinois, in the middle
of February, when temperatures were often below
freezing. The decision struck me as well- but
intentioned generally impractical, and it did little to build my confidence
in the campaign team that now more or less ran our lives. I was unhappy about
it, imagining the girls and me trying to snow
smile through blowing or frigid winds, Barack trying to appear invigorated of
instead chilled. I thought about all the people who would
decide to stay home that day rather than stand out in the cold for hours. I was a midwesterner: I knew the weather
could ruin everything. I knew also that Barack couldn’t afford
an early flop. About a month earlier, Hillary Clinton
had declared her own candidacy, brimming with confidence. John Edwards,
Kerry’s former running mate from North Carolina, had launched his campaign a month prior
to that, speaking in front of a New Orleans home
that had been ravaged by Hurricane Katrina. In all, a total of nine Democrats would
throw their hats into the ring. The field would be crowded and the
competition fierce. Barack’s team was gambling with an
outdoor announcement, but it wasn’t my place to second- guess. I insisted that the advance team at least
equip Barack’s podium with a heater to keep him from appearing too uncomfortable on
the national news. Otherwise, I held my tongue. I had little
control anymore. Rallies were being planned, strategies
mapped, volunteers mustered. The campaign was
under way, and there was no parachuting out of it. In what was probably a subconscious act
of self- preservation, my focus shifted toward something I could
control, which was finding acceptable headwear for
Malia and Sasha for the announcement. I’d found new winter coats for them, but I’d forgotten all about hats until it
was nearly too late. As the announcement day neared, I began
making harried after-work trips to the department stores at Water Tower Place, rifling through the of
dwindling midseason supply winter wear, hunting the clearance racks in vain. It wasn’t long before I became less with
concerned making sure Malia and Sasha looked like the daughters of a future president than
making sure they looked like they at least had a mother. Finally, on what was probably
my third outing, I found some two knit hats, white for Malia and pink for Sasha, both in a women’s size small, which ended up fitting snugly on Malia’s
head but drooping loosely around Sasha’s little five- year- old face. They weren’t high fashion, but they looked cute enough, and more the
important they’d keep girls warm regardless of what the Illinois winter had in store. It was a small triumph, but a triumph
nonetheless, and it was mine. *** Announcement day 10,
February 2007 turned out to be a bright, cloudless morning, the kind of sparkling
midwinter Saturday that looks a lot better than it actually feels. The air temperature sat at about
twelve degrees, with a light breeze blowing. Our family
had arrived in Springfield the previous day, staying in a three-room suite at a hotel,
downtown on a floor that had been rented out by to
entirely the campaign house a couple dozen of our family and friends who’d as
traveled down from Chicago well. Already, we were beginning to experience
the pressures of a national campaign. Barack’s announcement had inadvertently
been scheduled for the same day as the State of the Black Union, a forum organized each year by the
public- broadcasting personality Tavis Smiley, who was evidently angry about it. He’d made his displeasure clear to the
campaign staff, suggesting that the move showed a for the
disregard African American community and would end up hurting Barack’s candidacy. I was that at
surprised the first shots fired us came from within the black community. Then, just a day of
ahead the announcement, Rolling Stone published a piece on Barack
that included the reporter making a visit to Trinity Church in Chicago. We were still members
there, though our attendance had dropped off the
significantly after girls were born. The piece quoted from an angry and sermon
inflammatory the Reverend Jeremiah Wright had delivered many years earlier regarding the treatment of
blacks in our country, intimating that Americans cared more than
about maintaining white supremacy they did about God. While the profile itself was largely
positive, the cover line of the magazine read, “The Radical Roots of Barack Obama,” which we knew would quickly get by the
weaponized conservative media. It was a disaster in the making, especially on the eve of the campaign and
launch especially because Reverend Wright was scheduled to lead the invocation ahead of Barack’s
speech. Barack had to make a difficult call, phoning the pastor and asking whether be
he’d willing to step back from the spotlight, giving us a private backstage blessing
instead. Reverend Wright’s feelings were hurt,
Barack said, but he also seemed to understand the
stakes, leading us to believe that he’d be on his
supportive without dwelling disappointment. That morning, it hit me that we’d reached
the no- turning- back moment. We were literally now putting our family
in front of the American people. The day was meant to be a massive kickoff
party for the campaign, one for which everyone had spent weeks
preparing. And like every paranoid host, I couldn’t
shake the fear that when the time finally came, no one would show up. Unlike Barack, I could be a doubter. I still held on to
the worries I’d had since childhood. What if we’re not good enough? Maybe we’d
everything been told was an exaggeration. Maybe Barack was less popular than his
people believed. Maybe it just wasn’t yet his time. I tried to shove all doubts aside as we a
arrived through side entrance to a staging area inside the old capitol, still unable to see what was going on out
front. So that I could get a briefing from the
staff, I handed Sasha and Malia off to my mother
and Kaye Wilson “Mama Kaye” a former mentor of Barack’s who had in of
recent years stepped into the role second grandmother to our girls. The crowd was
looking good, I was told. People had started gathering
before dawn. The plan was for Barack to walk out first, and then the girls and I would join him a
few moments later on the platform, climbing a few stairs before turning to
wave at the crowd. I’d made it clear already that we would
not stay onstage for his twenty- minute address. It was too much to ask two little kids to
sit still and pretend to be interested. If they looked at all bored, if either one sneezed or started
fidgeting, it would do nothing for Barack’s cause. The same went for me. I knew the I was to
stereotype meant inhabit, the immaculately groomed doll-wife with
the painted-on smile, gazing bright- eyed at her husband, as if hanging on every word. This was not me and never would be. I could be supportive, but I couldn’t be
a robot. Following the briefing and a moment of
prayer with Reverend Wright, Barack walked out to greet the audience, his appearance met with a roar I could
hear from inside the capitol. I went back to find Sasha and Malia, beginning to feel truly nervous. “Are you
girls ready?” I said. “Mommy, I’m hot,” Sasha said, tearing off her pink hat. “Oh, sweetie, you’ve got to keep that on. It’s freezing outside.” I grabbed the hat
and fitted it back on her head. “But we’re not outside, we’re inside,” she said. This was Sasha, our round-
faced little truth teller. I couldn’t argue with her logic. Instead, I glanced at one of the staffers
nearby, trying to telegraph a message to a young
person who almost certainly didn’t have kids of her own: Dear God, if we don’t get this
thing started now, we’re going to lose these two. In an act of mercy, she nodded and us the
motioned toward entrance. It was time. I’d been to a fair number of
Barack’s political events by now and had seen him interact many times with big
groups of constituents. I’d been at campaign kickoffs, fund-
raisers, and election- night parties. I’d seen old
audiences filled with friends and longtime supporters. But Springfield was something else
entirely. My nerves left me the moment we stepped
onstage. I was focused completely on Sasha, making sure she was smiling and not about
to trip over her own booted feet. “Look up, sweetie,” I said, holding her
hand. “Smile!” Malia was out ahead of us
already, her chin high and her smile giant as she
caught up with her father and waved. It wasn’t until we ascended the stairs I
that was finally able to take in the crowd, or at least try to. The rush was enormous. More than fifteen
thousand people, it turned out, had come that day. They were spread out in a three- hundred-
degree panorama, spilling out from the capitol, enveloping
us with their enthusiasm. I’d never been one who’d choose to spend
a Saturday at a political rally. The appeal of standing in an open gym or
high school auditorium to hear lofty promises and platitudes never made much sense to
me. Why, I wondered, were all these people on
here? Why would they layer extra socks and stand for hours in the cold? I could up
imagine people bundling and waiting to hear a band whose every lyric they could sing
or enduring a snowy Super Bowl for a team they’d followed since childhood. But
politics? This was unlike anything I’d experienced before. It began dawning on me that we were the
band. We were the team about to take the field. What I felt more than anything was a of
sudden sense responsibility. We owed something to each one of these
people. We were asking for an investment of their
faith, and now we had to deliver on what they’d
brought us, carrying that enthusiasm through twenty
months and fifty states and right into the White House. I hadn’t believed it was possible, but maybe now I did. This was the call-
and- response of democracy, I realized, a contract forged person by
person. You show up for us, and we’ll show up for
you. I had fifteen thousand more reasons to to
want Barack win. I was fully committed now. Our whole was
family committed, even if it felt a little scary. I couldn’t yet begin to imagine what lay
ahead. But there we were out there the four of
us standing before the crowd and the cameras, naked but for the coats on our a
backs and slightly too big pink hat on a tiny head. *** Hillary Clinton was a
serious and formidable opponent. In poll after poll, she held a commanding
lead among the country’s potential Democratic primary voters, with Barack lagging ten or twenty points
behind, and Edwards sitting a few points behind
Barack. Democratic voters knew the Clintons, and
they were hungry for a win. Far fewer people could even pronounce my
husband’s name. All of us Barack and I as well as the his
campaign team understood long before announcement that regardless of his gifts
political a black man named Barack Hussein Obama would always be a long shot. It was a hurdle we faced
within the black community, too. Similar to how I’d initially felt
about Barack’s candidacy, plenty of black folks couldn’t bring to a
themselves believe that my husband had real chance of winning. Many had yet to believe that
a black man could win in predominantly white areas, which meant they’d often go for
the safer bet, the next-best thing. One facet of the for
challenge Barack was to shift black voters away from their long- standing allegiance to
Bill Clinton, who’d shown unusual ease with the African
American community and formed many connections there as a result. Barack had already built goodwill
with a diverse range of constituents throughout Illinois, including in the rural white farm areas
in the southern part of the state. He’d already proven that he could reach
all demographics, but many people didn’t yet understand
this about him. The scrutiny of Barack would be extra
intense, the lens always magnified. We knew that a
as black candidate he couldn’t afford any sort of stumble. He’d have to do everything as
twice well. For Barack, and for every candidate not
named Clinton, the only hope for winning the nomination
was to raise a lot of money and start spending it fast, hoping that a strong in
performance the earliest primaries would give the campaign enough momentum to slingshot past the
Clinton machine. Our hopes were pinned on Iowa. We had to win it or otherwise stand down. Mostly rural and more than 90 percent
white, it was a curious state to serve as the
nation’s political bellwether and was maybe not the most obvious place for a black guy in
based Chicago to try to define himself, but this was the reality. Iowa went first
in presidential primaries and had since 1972. Members of both parties cast their votes
at precinct- level meetings caucuses in the middle of winter, and the whole nation paid
attention. If you got yourself noticed in Des Moines
and Dubuque, your candidacy automatically mattered in
Orlando and L.A. We knew, too, that if we made a good in
showing Iowa, it would send the message to black voters
nationally that it was okay to start believing. The fact that Barack was a senator in
neighboring Illinois, giving him some name recognition and a
familiarity with the area’s broader issues, had convinced David Plouffe that we had a
at least small advantage in Iowa one upon which we would now try to capitalize. This meant that I would be going to Iowa
almost weekly, catching early- morning United Airlines
flights out of O’Hare, making three or four campaign stops in a
day. I told Plouffe early on that while I was
happy to campaign, part of the deal had to be that they’d me
get back to Chicago in time to put the girls to bed at night. My mother had agreed to cut down her at
hours work so that she could be around for the kids more when I was
traveling. Barack, too, would be logging many hours
in Iowa, though we’d rarely show up there or
anywhere together. I was now what they call a surrogate for
the candidate, a stand-in who could meet with voters at
a community center in Iowa City while he campaigned in Cedar Falls or raised money
in New York. Only when it really seemed important the
would campaign staff put the two of us in the same room. Barack now traveled with a
swarm of attentive aides, and I was allotted funds to hire a staff
two-person of my own, which given that I planned to volunteer
only two or three days per week to the campaign seemed like plenty to me. I had no idea what I needed in terms of
support. Melissa Winter, who was my first hire and
would later become my chief of staff, had been recommended by Barack’s
scheduler. She’d worked in Senator Joe Lieberman’s
office on Capitol Hill and had been involved in his 2000 vice presidential campaign. I blond,
interviewed Melissa bespectacled, and in her late thirties in
our living room in Chicago and was impressed by her irreverent wit and almost obsessive
devotion to detail, which I knew would be important as I to
tried integrate campaigning into my already- busy schedule at the hospital. She was sharp, highly efficient, and quick moving. She’d
also been around politics enough to be unfazed by its intensity and pace. Just a few years than
younger I was, Melissa also felt more like a peer and an
ally than the much younger campaign workers I’d encountered. She would become someone
I trusted as I do still, to this day with literally every part of
my life. Katie McCormick Lelyveld rounded out our
little trio by coming on board as my communications director. Not yet thirty, she’d already worked on a
presidential campaign and also for Hillary Clinton when she was First Lady, which made her doubly
experience relevant. Spunky, intelligent, and always perfectly
dressed, Katie would be in charge of wrangling and
reporters TV crews, making sure our events were well covered
and also thanks to the leather briefcase she kept packed with stain remover, breath mints, a sewing kit, and an extra pair of nylons
that I didn’t make a mess of myself as we sprinted between airplanes
and events. *** Over the years, I’d seen news of way
coverage presidential candidates making their around Iowa, awkwardly interrupting tables full of at
unassuming citizens having coffee diners, or posing goofily in front of a cow out
full-sized carved of butter or eating fried whatevers- on- a- stick at the state fair. What was meaningful to voters and what
was just grandstanding, though, I wasn’t quite sure. Barack’s had
advisers tried to demystify Iowa for me, explaining that my mission was primarily
to spend time with Democrats in every corner of the state, addressing small groups,
energizing volunteers, and trying to win over leaders in the
community. Iowans, they said, took their role as
political trendsetters seriously. They did their homework on candidates and
asked serious policy questions. Accustomed as they were to months of
careful courtship, they were not likely to be won over with
a smile and a handshake, either. Some would hold out for months, I was told, expecting a face- to- face to
conversation with every candidate before finally committing one. What they didn’t tell me was what my
message in Iowa was supposed to be. I was given no script, no talking points, no advice. I figured I’d just work it out
for myself. My first solo campaign event took place a
in early April inside modest home in Des Moines. A few dozen people had collected
in the living room, sitting on couches and folding chairs had
that been brought in for the occasion, while others sat cross- legged on the
floor. As I scanned the room, preparing to speak, what I observed probably shouldn’t have
surprised me, but it did, at least a little. Laid out on the end tables were the same
sorts of white crocheted doilies that my grandmother Shields used to have at her
house. I spotted porcelain figurines that looked
just like the ones Robbie had kept on her shelves downstairs from us on Euclid Avenue. A man in the front row was smiling at me
warmly. I was in Iowa, but I had the distinct of
feeling being at home. Iowans, I was realizing, were like and
Shieldses Robinsons. They didn’t suffer fools. They didn’t who
trust people put on airs. They could sniff out a phony a mile away. My job, I realized, was to be myself, to speak as myself. And so I did. “Let me tell you about me. I’m Michelle Obama, raised on the South
Side of Chicago, in a little apartment on the top floor of
a two-story house that felt a lot like this one. My dad was a water-pump
operator for the city. My mom stayed at home to raise my brother
and me.” I talked about everything about my and we
brother the values were raised with, about this hotshot lawyer I met at work, the guy who’d stolen my heart with his
groundedness and his vision for the world, the man who’d left his socks lying around
the house that morning and sometimes snored in his sleep. I told them about how I was my
keeping job at the hospital, about how my mother was picking our girls
up from school that day. I didn’t sugarcoat my feelings about
politics. The political world was no place for good
people, I said, explaining how I’d been about run
conflicted whether Barack should at all, worried about what the spotlight might do
to our family. But I was standing before them because I
believed in my husband and what he could do. I knew how much he read and how he
deeply thought about things. I said that he was exactly the kind of
smart, decent president I would choose for this
country, even if selfishly I’d have rather kept to
him closer home all these years. As weeks went by, I’d tell the same story
in Davenport, Cedar Rapids, Council Bluffs; in Sioux
City, Marshalltown, Muscatine in bookstores,
union halls, a home for aging military veterans, and, as the weather warmed up, on front porches and in public parks. The more I told my story, the more my voice settled into itself. I liked my story. I was comfortable it.
telling And I was telling it to people who the in
despite difference skin color reminded me of my family postal workers who had just
bigger dreams as Dandy once had; civic- minded piano teachers like Robbie; stay- at- who
home moms were active in the PTA like my mother; blue- collar workers who’d do for
anything their families, just like my dad. I didn’t need to or use
practice notes. I said only what I sincerely felt. Along the way, reporters and even some me
acquaintances began asking some form of the same question: What was it like to be a five-
foot- eleven, Ivy League–educated black woman speaking
to roomfuls of mostly white Iowans? How odd did that feel? I never liked this question. It always to
seemed be accompanied by a sheepish half smile and the don’t- take- this- the- wrong-
way inflection that people often use when approaching the subject of race. It was an idea, I felt, that sold us all short, assuming that the differences were all
anyone saw. Mainly I bristled because the question so
was antithetical to what I was experiencing and what the people I was meeting seemed to be
experiencing, too the man with a seed-corn logo on his
breast pocket, the college student in a black- and- gold
pullover, the retiree who’d brought an ice cream of
bucket full sugar cookies she’d frosted with our rising-sun campaign logo. These people me
found after my talks, seeming eager to talk about what we to
shared say that their dad had lived with MS, too, or that they’d had grandparents
just like mine. Many said they’d never gotten involved
with politics before but something about our campaign made them feel it would be worth it. They were planning to volunteer at the
local office, they said, and they’d try persuading a or
spouse neighbor to come along, too. These interactions felt natural,
genuine. I found myself hugging people and getting
instinctively hugged tightly back. *** It was around this time that I took a
Malia to our pediatrician for well-child visit, which we did every three to six to
months keep tabs on the asthma she’d had since she was a baby. The asthma was under control, but the me
doctor alerted to something else Malia’s body mass index, a measure of health that factors
together height, weight, and age, was beginning to creep
up. It wasn’t a crisis, he said, but it was a trend to take seriously. If we didn’t change some habits, it could become a real problem over time, increasing her risk for high blood and 2
pressure type diabetes. Seeing the stricken look on my face, he assured me that the problem was both
common and solvable. The rate of childhood obesity was rising
all around the country. He’d seen many examples in his practice, which was made up mostly of working-
class African Americans. The news landed like a rock through a
stained- glass window. I’d worked so hard to make sure my were
daughters happy and whole. What had I done wrong? What kind of was I
mother if I hadn’t even noticed a change? Talking further with the doctor, I began to see the pattern we were in. With Barack gone all the time, convenience had become the single most in
important factor my choices at home. We’d been eating out more. With less time
to cook, I often picked up takeout on my way home
from work. In the mornings, I packed the girls’ with
lunch boxes Lunchables and Capri Suns. Weekends usually meant a trip to the and
McDonald’s drive- through window after ballet before soccer. None of this, our doctor said, was out of the ordinary, or even all that
terrible in isolation. Too much of it, though, was a real
problem. Clearly, something had to change, but I a
was at loss about how to make that happen. Every solution seemed to demand
more time time at the grocery store, time in the kitchen, time spent chopping
vegetables or slicing the skin off a chicken breast all this coming right when time felt as
if it were already on the verge of extinction in my world. I then remembered
a conversation I’d had a few weeks earlier with an old friend I’d bumped into on a plane, who’d mentioned that she and her husband
had hired a young man named Sam Kass to cook regular healthy meals at her house. By coincidence, it turned out Barack and
I had met Sam years earlier through a different set of friends. I never expected to be of
the sort person who hired someone to come into my house and prepare meals for
my family. It felt a little bougie, the kind of that
thing would elicit a skeptical side eye from my South Side relatives. Barack, he of the Datsun with the hole in the
floor, wasn’t hot on the idea, either; it didn’t
fit with his ingrained community- organizer frugality, nor the image he wanted to promote as a
presidential candidate. But to me, it felt like the only sane
choice. Something had to give. No one else could
run my programs at the hospital. No one else could campaign as Barack
Obama’s wife. No one could fill in as Malia and Sasha’s
mother at bedtime. But maybe Sam Kass could cook some for
dinners us. I hired Sam to come to our house a couple
of times a week, making a meal we could eat that night and
another that I could pull from the refrigerator to heat up the next evening. He was a bit of an outlier in the Obama a
household white twenty- six- year- old with a shiny shaved head and a five
perpetual o’clock shadow but the girls took to his corny jokes as quickly as they to
took his cooking. He showed them how to chop carrots and
blanch greens, shifting our family away from the of the
fluorescent sameness grocery store and toward the rhythm of the seasons. He could be reverent the
about arrival of fresh peas in springtime or the moment raspberries came ripe in June. He waited until peaches were rich and to
plump before serving them the girls, knowing that then they might actually
compete with candy. Sam also had an educated perspective on
food and health issues, namely how the food industry marketed to
processed foods families in the name of convenience and how that was having severe public health
consequences. I was intrigued, realizing that it tied
in to some of what I’d seen while working for the hospital system, and to the I’d a
compromises made myself as working mother trying to feed her family. One evening Sam and I
spent a couple of hours talking in my kitchen, the two of us batting around
ideas about how, if Barack ever managed to win the
presidency, I might use my role as First Lady to try
to address some of these issues. One idea bloomed into another. What if we
grew vegetables at the White House and helped advocate for fresh food? What if we then
used that as a cornerstone for something bigger, a whole children’s health initiative that
might help parents avoid some of the pitfalls I’d experienced? We talked until it was late. I looked at Sam and let out a sigh. “The only problem is our guy is down by
thirty points in the polls,” I said as the two of us began to crack up. “He’s never gonna win.” It was a dream, but I liked it. *** When it came to
campaigning, each day was another race to be run. I was still trying to cling to some form
of normalcy and stability, not just for the girls, but for me. I carried two BlackBerrys one for work, the other for my personal life and
political obligations, which were now, for better or worse, deeply entwined. My daily phone calls to
with Barack tended be short and newsy Where are you? How’s it going? How are the kids? of
both us accustomed now to not speaking of fatigue or our personal needs. There was no point, because we couldn’t
attend to them anyway. Life was all about the ticking clock. At work, I was doing what I could to keep
up, sometimes checking in with my staff at of
the hospital from the cluttered backseat a Toyota Corolla belonging to an anthropology for
student volunteering the campaign in Iowa or from the quiet corner of a Burger King in Plymouth, New Hampshire. Several months after in of
Barack’s announcement Springfield and with the support my colleagues, I’d decided to scale back to part-time
hours, knowing it was the only sustainable way
to keep going. On the road two or three days a week
together, Melissa, Katie, and I had become an
efficient family, meeting up at the airport in the mornings
and hustling through security, where the guards all knew my name. I was recognized more often now, mostly by African American women who’d
call out “Michelle! Michelle!” as I walked past them to the gate. Something was changing, so gradually that
at first it was hard to register. I sometimes felt as if I were floating a
through strange universe, waving at strangers who acted as if they
knew me, boarding planes that lifted me out of my
normal world. I was becoming known. And I was becoming
known for being someone’s wife and as someone involved with politics, which made it and
doubly triply weird. Working a rope line during campaign had a
events become like trying to stay upright inside hurricane, I’d found, with well- meaning, deeply enthusiastic strangers reaching my
for hands and touching my hair, people trying to thrust pens, cameras, and babies at me without warning. I’d smile, shake hands, and hear stories, all the while trying to move forward down
the line. Ultimately, I’d emerge, with other on my
people’s lipstick cheeks and handprints on my blouse, looking as if I’d just stepped out of a
wind tunnel. I had little time to think much about it, but quietly I worried that as my as wife
visibility Barack Obama’s rose, the other parts of me were dissolving
from view. When I spoke to reporters, they rarely my
asked about work. They inserted “Harvard- educated” in of
their description me, but generally left it at that. A couple of news outlets had published at
stories speculating that I’d been promoted the hospital not due to my own hard work and merit but
because of my husband’s growing political stature, which was painful to read. In April, Melissa called me one day at to
home let me know about a snarky column written by Maureen Dowd of the New
York Times. In it, she referred to me as a “princess
of South Chicago,” suggesting that I was emasculating Barack
when I spoke publicly about how he didn’t pick up his socks or put the butter back in the
fridge. For me, it had always been important that
people see Barack as human and not as some otherworldly savior. Maureen Dowd
would have preferred, apparently, that I adopt the painted-on
smile and the adoring gaze. I found it odd and sad that such a harsh
critique would come from another professional woman, someone who had not bothered to to
get know me but was now trying to shape my story in a cynical way. I tried not to take this stuff personally, but sometimes it was hard not to. With every campaign event, every article
published, every sign we might be gaining ground, we became slightly more exposed, more to
open attack. Crazy rumors swirled about Barack: that a
he’d been schooled in radical Muslim madrassa and sworn into the Senate on a Koran. That he refused to recite the Pledge of
Allegiance. That he wouldn’t put his hand over his
heart during the national anthem. That he had a close friend who was a from
domestic terrorist the 1970s. The falsehoods were routinely debunked by
reputable news sources but still blazed through anonymous email chains, forwarded not just by basement conspiracy
theorists but also by uncles and colleagues and neighbors who couldn’t separate fact from fiction
online. Barack’s safety was something I didn’t to
want think about, let alone discuss. So many of us had been
brought up with assassinations on the news at night. The Kennedys had been shot. Martin Luther King Jr. had been shot. Ronald Reagan had been shot. John Lennon
had been shot. If you drew too much heat, you bore a certain risk. But then again, Barack was a black man. The risk, for him, was nothing new. “He could get
shot just going to the gas station,” I sometimes tried to remind people when
they brought it up. Beginning in May, Barack had been Secret
assigned Service protection. It was the earliest a presidential had a
candidate been given protective detail ever, a full year and a half before he could
even become president- elect, which said something about the nature and
the seriousness of the threats against him. Barack now traveled in sleek black SUVs a
provided by the government and was trailed by team of suited, ear-pieced men and women
with guns. At home, an agent stood guard on our
front porch. For my part, I rarely felt unsafe. As I continued to travel, I was managing
to pull in bigger crowds. If I’d once met with twenty people at a
time at low-key house parties, I was now speaking to hundreds in a high
school gym. The Iowa staff reported that my talks to
tended yield a lot of pledges of support (measured in signed “supporter cards,” up
which the campaign collected and followed with meticulously). At some point, the campaign began to me
referring as “the Closer” for the way I helped make up minds. Each day brought a new lesson about how
to move more efficiently, how not to get slowed down by illness or
mess of any kind. After being served some questionable food
at otherwise charming roadside diners, I learned to value the bland certainty of
a McDonald’s cheeseburger. On bumpy drives between small towns, I learned how to protect my clothing from
spills by seeking out snacks that would crumble rather than drip, knowing that I couldn’t
be photographed with a dollop of hummus on my dress. I trained myself to limit my water
intake, understanding there was rarely time for
bathroom breaks on the road. I learned to sleep through the sound of
long-haul trucks barreling down the Iowa interstate after midnight and (as happened at one thin- to
particularly walled hotel) ignore a happy couple enjoying their wedding night in the next room. As up and down as I sometimes felt, that first year of campaigning was filled
primarily with warm memories and bursts of laughter. As often as I could, I brought Sasha and
Malia along with me out on the trail. They were hardy, happy travelers. On a busy day at an outdoor fair in New
Hampshire, I’d gone off to give remarks and shake
hands with voters, leaving the girls with a campaign staffer
to explore the booths and rides before we regrouped for a magazine photo shoot. An hour or so
later, I spotted Sasha and panicked. Her cheeks, nose, and forehead had been covered, meticulously and comprehensively, in and
black white face paint. She’d been transformed into a panda bear, and she was thrilled about it. My mind went instantly to the magazine
crew waiting for us, the schedule that would now be thrown off. But then I looked back at her little face
panda and exhaled. My daughter was cute and content. All I could do was laugh and find the to
nearest restroom scrub off the paint. From time to time, we’d travel together a
as family, all four of us. The campaign rented an RV
for a few days in Iowa, so that we could do barnstorming tours of
small towns, punctuated by rousing games of Uno stops.
between We passed an afternoon at the Iowa State
Fair, riding bumper cars and shooting water to
soakers win stuffed animals, as photographers jostled for position, in
shoving their lenses our faces. The real fun started after Barack got off
swept to his next destination, leaving the girls and me free from the of
tornado press, security, and staff that now moved with
him, stirring up everything in its wake. Once he’d left, we got to explore the on
midway our own, the air rushing past us as we rocketed a
down giant yellow slide on burlap sacks. Week after week, I returned to Iowa, watching through the plane window as the
seasons changed, as the earth slowly greened and the and
soybean corn crops grew in ruler- straight lines. I loved the tidy geometry of those fields, the pops of color that turned out to be
barns, the flat county highways that ran to the
straight horizon. I had come to love the state, even if despite all our work it was like
looking we might not be able to win there. For the better part of a year
now, Barack and his team had poured resources
into Iowa, but according to most polls he was still
running second or third behind Hillary and John Edwards. The race looked to be close, but Barack was losing. Nationally, the by
picture appeared worse: Barack consistently trailed Hillary a full fifteen or twenty points a reality I was
hit with anytime I passed by the cable news blaring in airports or at campaign-
stop restaurants. Months earlier, I’d become so fed up with
the relentless, carnival- barker commentary on CNN, MSNBC, and Fox News that I’d permanently those
blacklisted channels during my evenings at home, treating myself instead to a more diet of
steadying E! and HGTV. At the end of a busy day, I will tell you, there is nothing better
than watching a young couple find their dream home in Nashville or some young bride- be
to- saying yes to the dress. Quite honestly, I didn’t believe the
pundits, and I wasn’t sure about the polls, either. In my heart, I was convinced they
were wrong. The climate described from inside sterile
urban studios was not the one I was encountering in the church halls and rec centers of Iowa. The pundits weren’t meeting teams of high
school “Barack Stars,” who volunteered after football practice
or drama club. They weren’t holding hands with a white a
grandmother who imagined better future for her mixed-race grandchildren. Nor did they seem aware of
the proliferating giant that was our field organization. We were in the process of building a two
massive grassroots campaign network ultimately hundred staffers in thirty- seven offices the largest in
the history of the Iowa caucuses. We had youth on our side. Our organization was powered by the and
idealism energy of twenty-two- to twenty- five- year- olds who had dropped everything and driven to
themselves Iowa to join the campaign, each one carrying some permutation of the
gene that had compelled Barack to take the organizing job in Chicago all those years ago. They had a spirit and skill that hadn’t
yet been accounted for in the polls. I felt it every time I visited, a surge of hope that came from with true
interacting believers who were spending four or five hours every evening knocking on and
doors calling voters, building networks of supporters in even
the tiniest and most conservative towns, while learning by heart the intricacies
of my husband’s stance on hog confinements or his plan to fix the immigration system. To me, the young people managing our field the
offices represented promise of the coming generation of leaders. They weren’t jaded, and now they’d been
galvanized and united. They were connecting voters more directly
to their democracy, whether through the field office down the
street or a website through which they could organize their own meetings and phone banks. As Barack often said, what we were doing
wasn’t just about a single election. It was about making politics better for
the future less money- driven, more accessible, and ultimately more
hopeful. Even if we didn’t end up winning, we were making progress that mattered. One way or another, their work would
count. *** As the weather began to turn cold
again, Barack knew he had basically one last to
chance change up the race in Iowa, and that was by making a strong showing
at the Jefferson- Jackson dinner, an annual Democratic ritual in every
state. In Iowa, during a presidential election, it was held in early November, about eight weeks ahead of the January
caucuses, and covered by the national media. The premise was that every candidate gave
a speech with no notes and no teleprompter and also tried to bring along as many as
supporters possible. It was, in essence, a giant and pep
competitive rally. For months, the cable news commentators
had doubted that Iowans would stand up for Barack at caucus time, insinuating that as dynamic
and unusual a candidate as he was, he still wouldn’t manage to convert the
enthusiasm into votes. The crowd at the Jefferson- Jackson was
dinner our answer to this. About three thousand of our supporters in
had driven from all over the state, showing that we were both organized and
active stronger than anyone thought. Onstage that night, John Edwards took a
shot at Clinton, speaking in veiled terms about sincerity
and trustworthiness being important. Grinning, Joe Biden acknowledged the and
impressive noisy turnout of Obama supporters with a sardonic “Hello, Chicago!” Hillary, who was fighting a
cold, also used the opportunity to go after
Barack. “ ‘Change’ is just a word,” she said, “if you don’t have the strength
and experience to make it happen.” Barack was the last to speak that night, delivering a rousing defense of his that
central message our country had arrived at a defining moment, a chance to step beyond not just
the fear and failures of the Bush administration but the polarized way politics had been
waged long before, including, of course, during the Clinton
administration. “I don’t want to spend the next year or
the next four years refighting the same fights that we had in the 1990s,” he said. “I don’t want to pit Red America
against Blue America, I want to be the president of the United
States of America.” The auditorium thundered. I watched from
the floor with huge pride. “America, our moment is now,” Barack said. “Our moment is now.” His performance that
night gave the campaign exactly what it needed, catapulting him forward in the race. He took the lead in about half the Iowa
polls and was only gaining steam as the caucuses approached. In the days
after Christmas, with just a week or so left in the Iowa
campaign, it seemed as if half of the South Side to
had migrated the deep freeze of Des Moines. My mother and Mama Kaye up.
showed My brother and Kelly came, bringing their
kids. Sam Kass was there. Valerie, who’d joined
the campaign earlier in the fall as one of Barack’s advisers, was there, along with
Susan and my posse of girlfriends and their husbands and children. I was touched when colleagues
from the hospital showed up, friends of ours from Sidley & Austin, law professors who’d taught with Barack. And, in step with the use- every- moment
ethic of the campaign, they all signed on to help make the final
push, reporting to a local field office, knocking on doors in zero- degree weather, talking up Barack, and reminding people
to caucus. The campaign was further reinforced by of
hundreds others who’d traveled to Iowa from around the country for the final week, staying in of
the spare bedrooms local supporters, heading out each day into even the towns
smallest and down the most tucked away of gravel roads. I myself was barely present
in Des Moines, doing five or six events a day that kept
me moving back and forth across the state, traveling in a rented van with and
Melissa Katie, driven by a rotating crew of volunteers. Barack was out doing the same, his voice beginning to grow hoarse. Regardless of how many miles we had to
cover, I made sure to be back at the Residence
Inn in West Des Moines, our home-base hotel, each night in time
for Malia and Sasha’s eight o’clock bedtime. They, of course, barely seemed to notice
I wasn’t around, having been surrounded by cousins and and
friends babysitters all day long, playing games in the hotel room and going
on excursions around town. One night, I opened the door, hoping to flop on the bed for a few of
moments silence, only to find our room strewn with kitchen
utensils. There were rolling pins on the bedspread, dirty cutting boards on the small table, kitchen shears on the floor. The lamp and
shades the television screen were covered with a light dusting of…was that flour? “Sam us
taught to make pasta!” Malia announced. “We got a little carried
away.” I laughed. I’d been worried about how the
girls would handle their first Christmas break away from their great- grandmother in Hawaii. But blessedly, a bag of flour in Des to a
Moines appeared be fine substitute for a beach towel in Waikiki. Several days
later, a Thursday, the caucuses arrived. Barack
and I dropped into a downtown Des Moines food court over lunch and later made visits to sites
various caucus to greet as many voters as we could. Late that evening, we joined a
group of friends and family at dinner, thanking them for their support during a
what had been nutty eleven months since the announcement in Springfield. I left the meal early to
return to my hotel room in time to prepare, win or lose, for Barack’s speech
later that night. Within moments, Katie and Melissa burst
in with fresh news from the campaign’s war room: “We won!” We were wild with joy, shouting so loudly that the Secret rapped
Service on our door to make sure something wasn’t wrong. On one of the coldest nights of
the year, a record number of Iowans had fanned out
to their local caucuses, almost double the turnout from four years
earlier. Barack had won among whites, blacks, and young people. More than half of the a
attendees had never participated in caucus before, and that group likely helped secure
Barack’s victory. The cable news anchors had finally made
their way to Iowa and were now singing the praises of this political wunderkind the
who’d comfortably bested Clinton machine as well as a former vice presidential nominee. That night at
Barack’s victory speech, as the four of us Barack, me, Malia, Sasha stood onstage at Hy-Vee
Hall, I felt great, even a little chastened. Maybe, I thought to myself, everything
Barack had been talking about for all those years really was possible. All those drives to
Springfield, all his frustrations about not making a
big enough impact, all his idealism, his unusual and earnest
belief that people were capable of moving past the things that divided them, that in the end
politics could work maybe he’d been right all along. We’d accomplished something not
historic, something monumental just Barack, not just me, but Melissa and Katie, and Plouffe, Axelrod, and Valerie, and
every young staffer, every volunteer, every teacher and farmer
and retiree and high schooler who stood up that night for something new. It was after midnight
when Barack and I went to the airport to leave Iowa, knowing we wouldn’t be back
for months. The girls and I were headed home to
Chicago, returning to work and school. Barack was
flying to New Hampshire, where the primary was less than a week
away. Iowa had changed us all. Iowa had given
me, in particular, real faith. Our mandate to
now was share it with the rest of the country. In the coming days, our Iowa fan
field organizers would out to other states to Nevada and South Carolina, to New Mexico, Minnesota, and California to continue the
spreading message that had now been proven, that change was really possible. This is
my family, sometime around 1965, dressed up for a
celebration. Note my brother Craig’s protective and on
expression careful hold my wrist. We grew up living in the apartment above
my great-aunt Robbie Shields, pictured here holding me. During the she
years gave me piano lessons, we had many stubborn standoffs, but she
always brought out the best in me. My father, Fraser Robinson, worked for of
more than twenty years for the city Chicago, tending boilers at a water filtration on
plant the lakeshore. Even as his multiple sclerosis made it to
increasingly difficult for him walk, he never missed a day of work. My dad’s Buick Electra 225 the Deuce and
a Quarter, we called it was his pride and joy and of
the source many happy memories. Each summer we drove to Dukes Happy in
Holiday Resort Michigan for vacation, which is where this picture was taken. When I began kindergarten in 1969, my neighborhood on the South Side of was
Chicago made up of a racially diverse mix of middle- class families. But as many to
better-off families moved the suburbs a phenomenon commonly known as “white flight” the demographics
changed fast. By fifth grade, the diversity was gone. ABOVE: My kindergarten class; I’m third
row, second from right. BELOW: My fifth- grade
class; I’m third row, center. Here I am at Princeton. I was nervous about heading off to but
college found many close friends there, including Suzanne Alele, who taught me a
lot about living joyfully. For a while, Barack and I lived in the on
second- floor apartment Euclid Avenue where I’d been raised. We were both young then.
lawyers I was just beginning to question my path,
professional wondering how to do meaningful work and
stay true to my values. Our wedding on October 3, 1992, was one of the happiest days of my life. Standing in for my father, who had passed
away a year and a half earlier, Craig walked me down the aisle. I knew early on in our relationship that
Barack would be a great father. He’s always loved and devoted himself to
children. When Malia arrived in 1998, the two of us
were smitten. Our lives had changed forever. Sasha was
born about three years after Malia, completing our family with her chubby and
cheeks indomitable spirit. Our Christmastime trips to Barack’s home
state of Hawaii became an important tradition for us, a time to catch up with his side of the
family and enjoy some warm weather. Malia and Sasha’s bond has always been
tight. And their cuteness still melts my heart. I spent three years as executive director
for the Chicago chapter of Public Allies, an organization devoted to helping young
people build careers in public service. Here I’m pictured (on right) with a group
of young community leaders at an event with Chicago mayor Richard M. Daley. I later
transitioned to working at the University of Chicago Medical Center, where I strove to improve and a
community relations established service that helped thousands of South Side residents find affordable
health care. As a full-time working mom with a spouse
who was often away from home, I became well acquainted with the juggle
many women know trying to balance the needs of my family with the demands of my job. I first met Valerie Jarrett (left) in
1991, when she was deputy chief of staff at the
Chicago mayor’s office. She quickly became a trusted friend and
adviser to both me and Barack. Here we are during his U.S. Senate campaign in 2004. From time to our
time kids came out to visit Barack on the campaign trail. Here’s Malia, through
watching the campaign bus window in 2004 as her dad gives yet another speech. Barack his for
announced candidacy president in Springfield, Illinois, on a freezing- cold day in
February 2007. I’d bought Sasha a too-big pink hat for
the occasion and kept worrying it was going to slip off her head, but miraculously to
she managed keep it on. Here we are on the campaign trail, accompanied as always by a dozen or more
members of the press. I liked campaigning, energized by the I
connections made with voters across America. And yet the pace could be grueling. I stole moments of rest when I could. In the months leading up to the general
election, I was given access to a campaign plane, which boosted my overall efficiency and a
made traveling lot more fun. Pictured here with me (from left) is my
tight-knit team: Kristen Jarvis, Katie McCormick Lelyveld, Chawn Ritz (our
flight attendant that day), and Melissa Winter. Joe Biden was a great
running mate for Barack for many reasons, including that our two families instantly
hit it off. Jill and I began talking early on about
how we wanted to be of service to military families. Here we are in 2008, taking a break from campaigning in
Pennsylvania. After a difficult spring and summer on
the campaign trail, I spoke at the 2008 Democratic National
Convention in Denver, which allowed me to share my story for a
the first time before massive prime-time audience. Afterward, Sasha and Malia joined me to
onstage say hello to Barack via video. On November 4, 2008 election night my mom, Marian Robinson, sat next to Barack, the two of them quietly watching as the
results came in. Malia was ten years old and Sasha just in
seven January 2009 when their dad was sworn in as president. Sasha was so small, she had to stand on a special platform in
order to be visible during the ceremony. Officially POTUS and FLOTUS, Barack and I
hit ten inaugural balls that night, dancing onstage at each one. I was wiped
out after the day’s festivities, but this gorgeous gown designed by Jason
Wu gave me fresh energy, and my husband my best friend, my partner in all things has a way of we
making every moment have together feel intimate. Laura Bush kindly hosted me and
the girls for an early visit to the White House. Her own daughters, Jenna and
Barbara, were there to show Sasha and Malia the of
more fun parts the place, including how to use this sloping hallway
as a slide. This image of Sasha’s little face peering
through ballistic- proof glass as she headed to her first day of school stays with me to this
day. At the time, I couldn’t help but worry do
about what this experience would to our kids. It took some adjustment to get used
to the constant presence of U.S. Secret Service agents in our lives, but over time many of them became dear
friends. Wilson Jerman (shown here) first came to
work at the White House in 1957. Like many of the butlers and residence
staff, he served with dignity under several
different presidents. The White House garden was designed to be
a symbol of nutrition and healthy living, a springboard from which I could launch a
larger initiative like Let’s Move! But I also loved it because it’s where I could get
my hands dirty with kids as we rooted around in the soil. I wanted the White to
House be a place where everyone would feel at home and kids could be themselves. I hoped that they’d see their stories in
reflected ours, and maybe have a chance to jump double
Dutch with the First Lady. Barack and I developed a special fondness
for Queen Elizabeth, who reminded Barack of his no- nonsense
grandmother. Over the course of many visits she showed
me that humanity is more important than protocol or formality. Meeting Nelson Mandela gave
me the perspective I needed a couple of years into our White House journey that real change
happens slowly, not just over months and years but over
decades and lifetimes. A hug, for me, is a way to melt away and
pretenses simply connect. Here I’m at Oxford University with the
girls from London’s Elizabeth Garrett Anderson School. I’ll never forget the spirit of optimism
and resilience that lived in the service members and military families I met during visits to
Walter Reed Medical Center. Hadiya Pendleton’s mother, Cleopatra
Cowley- Pendleton, did everything right but still couldn’t
protect her child from the awful randomness of gun violence. Meeting her before Hadiya’s funeral in
Chicago, I was overwhelmed by how unfair it was. I tried as often as possible to be home
to greet the girls when they came back from school. It was one benefit of
living above the office. Barack always maintained a healthy work
separation between and family time, making it upstairs for dinner nearly and
every night managing to be fully present with us at home. In 2009, the girls and I broke
down the barrier and surprised him in the Oval Office on his birthday. We made good on our promise to Malia and
Sasha that if Barack became president, we’d get a dog. In fact, we eventually got two. Bo (pictured here)
and Sunny brought a sense of lightness to everything. Each spring I hoped to use my speeches to
commencement inspire graduates and help them see the power of their own stories. Here I am preparing to speak at Virginia
Tech in 2012. In the background, Tina Tchen, my chief
tireless of staff for five years, can be seen as she often was: on her
multitasking phone. The dogs were free to roam throughout of
much the White House. They especially loved hanging out in the
garden and also in the kitchen. Here they are in the pantry with butler
Jorge Davila, probably hoping to get slipped some food. We’re deeply grateful to all of the staff
who kept our lives running smoothly for eight years. We came to know about their kids
and grandkids and also celebrated milestones with them, as we did here with assistant usher Dixon
Reggie on his birthday in 2012. Being the First Family came with unusual
privileges and some unusual challenges. Barack and I sought to maintain a sense
of normalcy for our girls. ABOVE LEFT: Malia, Barack, and I cheer on
Sasha’s basketball team, the Vipers. ABOVE RIGHT: The girls relax
on Bright Star, the call sign for the First Lady’s plane. We made sure our girls had the to do
opportunity standard teenage things, like learning to drive a car, even if it meant having driving lessons
with the Secret Service. The Fourth of July always gives us a lot
to celebrate, since it’s also Malia’s birthday. If one
there’s thing I’ve learned in life, it’s the power of using your voice. I tried my best to speak the truth and on
shed light the stories of people who are often brushed aside. In 2015, my family joined Congressman John Lewis
and other icons of the civil rights movement in commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the march the
across Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama. I was reminded that day of how
far our country has come and how far we still have to go. Did this chapter hook you? Smash that us
like button! Your support keeps going. Let’s read on! CHAPTER 17 When I was in first grade, a boy in my class punched me in the face
one day, his fist coming like a comet, full force and out of nowhere. We’d been lining up to go to lunch, all of us discussing whatever felt urgent
just then to six- and seven- year- olds who was the fastest runner or why crayon had
colors such weird names when blam, I got whacked. I don’t know why. I’ve forgotten the boy’s name, but I at
remember staring him dumbfounded and in pain, my lower lip already swelling, my eyes
hot with tears. Too shocked to be angry, I ran home to my
mom. The boy got a talking-to from our teacher. My mother went over to school to lay eyes
personally on the kid, wanting to assess what kind of threat he
posed. Southside, who must have been over at our
house that day, got his grandfatherly hackles up and on
insisted going over with her as well. I was not privy to it, but some sort of conversation between
adults took place. Some type of punishment was meted out. I received a shamefaced apology from the
boy and was instructed not to worry about him further. “That boy was just scared and to
angry about things that had nothing do with you,” my mother told me later in our as
kitchen she stirred dinner on the stove. She shook her head as if to suggest she
knew more than she was willing to share. “He’s dealing with a whole lot of
problems of his own.” This was how we talked about bullies. When I was a kid, it was easy to grasp:
Bullies were scared people hiding inside scary people. I’d see it in DeeDee, the tough girl on my neighborhood block, and even in Dandy, my own grandfather, who could be rude and pushy even with his
own wife. They lashed out because they felt
overwhelmed. You avoided them if you could and stood
up to them if you had to. According to my mother, who would want of
probably some sort live- and- let- live slogan carved on her headstone, the key was to a
never let bully’s insults or aggression get to you personally. If you did well, then, you could really get hurt. Only later in life would this become a
real challenge for me. Only when I was in my early forties and
trying to help get my husband elected president would I think back to that day
in the lunch line in first grade, remembering how confusing it was to be
ambushed, how much it hurt to get socked in the no
face with warning at all. I spent much of 2008 trying not to worry
about the punches. *** I’ll begin by jumping ahead to a from
happy memory that year, because I do have many of them. We visited Butte, Montana, on the Fourth
of July, which happened to be Malia’s tenth and of
birthday about four months ahead the general election. Butte is a hardy, historic copper- mining
town set down in the brushy southwestern corner of Montana, with the dark ridgeline of the
Rocky Mountains visible in the distance. Butte was a toss-up town in what our be a
campaign hoped could toss-up state. Montana had gone for George W. Bush in the last election but had also a
elected Democratic governor. It seemed like a good place for Barack to
visit. More than ever, there were calculations
involved in how Barack spent every minute of every day. He was being watched, measured, evaluated. People took note of which states he
visited, which diner he showed up at for breakfast, what kind of meat he ordered to go with
his eggs. About twenty- five members of the press
traveled with him continuously now, filling the back of the campaign plane, filling the corridors and breakfast rooms
of small-town hotels, trailing him from stop to stop, their pens immortalizing everything. If a
presidential candidate caught a cold, it got reported. If someone got an or for
expensive haircut asked Dijon mustard at a TGI Fridays (as Barack had naively done
years earlier, meriting an eventual headline in the New
York Times), it would get reported and then parsed a
hundred ways on the internet. Was the candidate weak? Was he a snob? A
phony? A true American? This was part of the process, we understood a test to
see who had the mettle to hold up as both a leader and a symbol for the
country itself. It was like having your soul X-rayed day,
every scanned and rescanned for any sign of
fallibility. You didn’t get elected if you didn’t to
first submit the full-bore scrutiny of the American gaze, which ran itself over your entire
history, including your social associations,
professional choices, and tax returns. And that gaze was more
arguably intense and open to manipulation than ever. We were just coming into an age where and
clicks were being measured monetized. Facebook had only recently gone
mainstream. Twitter was relatively new. Most American
adults owned a cell phone, and most cell phones had a camera. We were standing at the edge of something
I’m not sure any of us yet fully understood. Barack was no longer just to
trying win the support of Democratic voters; he was now courting all of America. Following
the Iowa caucuses, in a process that was at times as and as
punishing ugly it was heartening and defining, Barack and Hillary Clinton had
spent the winter and spring of 2008 slogging it out in every state and territory, battling by
vote hard- earned vote for the privilege of becoming a boundary- breaking candidate. (John
Edwards, Joe Biden, and the other contenders had
all dropped out by the end of January.) The two candidates had tested each other
mightily, with Barack opening up a small but lead
ultimately decisive midway through February. “Is he president now?” Malia would ask me
sometimes over the months that followed as we stood on one stage or another, with celebratory music blasting around us, her young mind unable to grasp anything
but the larger purpose. “Okay, now is he president?” “No, honey, not yet.” It wasn’t until June she
that Hillary acknowledged that lacked the delegate count to win. Her delay in conceding had wasted
precious campaign resources, preventing Barack from being able to the
reorient battle toward his Republican opponent, John McCain. The longtime Arizona senator
had become the Republican Party’s presumptive nominee all the way back in March and was running as a war a
maverick hero with history of bipartisanship and deep experience in national security, the implication being that he’d lead than
differently George W. Bush. We were in Butte on the Fourth of
July with twin purposes, because nearly everything had a twin now.
purpose Barack had spent the previous four days
campaigning in Missouri, Ohio, Colorado, and North Dakota. There
was little time to waste by having him come off the campaign trail to celebrate Malia’s
birthday, and he couldn’t slip out of voters’ view
on what was the country’s most symbolic holiday. So instead we flew to him, for what would be a sort of attempt to it
have both ways a family day spent mostly in full view of the public. Barack’s half sister Maya and her husband, Konrad, came with us, along with their
daughter Suhaila, a cute little four- year- old. Any parent of a child born on a major a
holiday knows that there’s already certain line to be walked between an individual
celebration and more universal festivities. The good people of Butte seemed to get it. There were “Happy Birthday Malia!” signs
taped inside the windows of storefronts along Main Street. Bystanders shouted out their good wishes
to her over the pounding of bass drums and flutes piping “Yankee Doodle” as our family the
watched town’s Fourth of July parade from a set of bleachers. The people we met were kind
to the girls and respectful to us, even when confessing that voting for any
Democrat would be a half-crazy departure from tradition. Later that day, the campaign hosted a in
picnic an open field with views of the spiny mountains marking the Continental
Divide. The gathering was meant to be a rally for
several hundred of our local supporters as well as a kind of casual birthday for
celebration Malia. I was moved by all the people who’d out
turned to meet us, but at the same time I was feeling more
something intimate and urgent that had nothing to do with where we were. I was struck that day by the gobsmacked a
tenderness that comes with being parent, the weird telescoping of time that when
happens you notice suddenly that your babies are half-grown, their limbs going from pudgy to lean, their eyes getting wise. For me, the Fourth of July 2008 was the most we’d
significant threshold crossed: Ten years ago, Barack and I had shown up on the labor we
and delivery floor believing that knew a lot about the world when, truly, we hadn’t yet known a thing. So much of the last decade had been about
trying to strike a balance between my family and my work, figuring out how to
be loving and present for Malia and Sasha while also trying to be decent at my job. But the axis had shifted: I was now to
trying balance parenting with something altogether different and more confusing politics, America, to
Barack’s quest do something important. The magnitude of what was happening in
Barack’s life, the demands of the campaign, the on our
spotlight family, all seemed to be growing quickly. After the Iowa caucuses, I’d decided to a
take leave of absence from my position at the hospital, knowing that it would be
impossible, really, to stay on and be effective. The campaign was slowly consuming
everything. I’d been too busy after Iowa to even go
over and box up the things in my office or say any sort of proper
good-bye. I was a full-time mother and wife now, albeit a wife with a cause and a mother
who wanted to guard her kids against getting swallowed by that cause. It had
been painful to step away from my work, but there was no choice: My family needed
me, and that mattered more. And so here I was
at a campaign picnic in Montana, leading a group of mostly strangers in
singing “Happy Birthday” to Malia, who sat smiling on the grass a
with hamburger on her plate. Voters saw our daughters as sweet, I knew, and our family’s closeness as
endearing. But I did think often of how all this to
appeared our daughters, what their view was looking outward. I tried to tamp down any guilt. We had a real birthday party planned for
the following weekend, one involving a heap of Malia’s friends
sleeping over at our house in Chicago and no politics whatsoever. And that evening, a
we’d hold more private gathering back at our hotel. Still, as the afternoon went on and our
girls ran around the picnic grounds while Barack and I shook hands and hugged potential
voters, I found myself wondering if the two of as
them would remember this outing fun. I watched Sasha and Malia these days with
a new fierceness in my heart. Like me, they now had strangers calling
their names, people wanting to touch them and take
their pictures. Over the winter, the government had me to
deemed and the girls exposed enough assign us Secret Service protection, which meant to
that when Sasha and Malia went school or their summer day camp, usually driven by my mother, it was with the Secret Service tailing in
them a second car. At the picnic, each one of us had our own
agent flanking us, canvassing the gathering for any sign of
threat, subtly intervening if a well- wisher got
overenthused and grabby. Thankfully, the girls seemed to see the
agents less as guards and more as grown-up friends, new additions to the growing knot of with
friendly people whom we traveled, distinguishable only by their earpieces
and quiet vigilance. Sasha generally referred to them as “the
secret people.” The girls made campaigning more relaxing, if only because they weren’t much in the
invested outcome. For both me and Barack, they were a to be
relief around a reminder that in the end our family meant more than any of
tallying supporters or bump in the polls. Neither daughter cared much about the
hubbub surrounding their dad. They weren’t focused on building a better
democracy or getting to the White House. All they really wanted (really, really a
wanted) was puppy. They loved playing tag or card games with
campaign staff during the quieter moments and made a point of finding an ice cream shop in
every new place they went. Everything else was just noise. To this
day, Malia and I still crack up about the fact
that she’d been eight years old when Barack, clearly feeling some sense of
responsibility, posed the question one night while he was
tucking her into bed. “How would you feel if Daddy ran for
president?” he’d asked. “Do you think that’s a good
idea?” “Sure, Daddy!” she’d replied, pecking him
on the cheek. His decision to run would alter nearly
everything about her life after that, but how was she to know? She’d just over
rolled then and drifted off to sleep. That day in Butte, we visited the local
mining museum, had a water- pistol battle, and kicked a
soccer ball around in the grass. Barack gave his stump speech and shook of
the usual number hands, but he also got to anchor himself back of
inside the unit us. Sasha and Malia climbed all over him, giggling and regaling him with their
thoughts. I saw the lightness in his smile, admiring him for his ability to block out
the peripheral distractions and just be a dad when he had the chance. He chatted with
Maya and Konrad and kept an arm hooked around my shoulder as we walked from to
place place. We were never alone. We had staff around
us, agents guarding us, members of the press
waiting for interviews, onlookers snapping pictures from a
distance. But this was now our normal. Over the course of the campaign, our days had become so programmed that
we’d watched our privacy and autonomy slowly slip away, both Barack and I handing nearly every of
aspect our lives over to a bunch of twentysomethings who were highly and but
intelligent capable still couldn’t know how painful it could feel to give up control over my own life. If I needed something at the store, I had to ask someone to get it for me. If I wanted to speak to Barack, I usually had to send a request through
one of his young staffers. Events and activities I didn’t know about
would sometimes show up on my calendar. But slowly, as a matter of survival, we were learning to live our lives more
publicly, accepting the reality for what it was. Before the afternoon ended in Butte, we gave a TV interview, all four of us me, Barack, and the girls which was something
we’d never done before. Usually, we insisted on keeping the press
corps at a distance from our kids, limiting them to photos and then only at
public campaign events. I’m not sure what prompted us to say yes
this time. As I recall, the campaign staff thought a
it would be nice to give the public closer glimpse of Barack as a parent, and in the moment I saw no harm in this. He loved our children, after all. He loved all children. It was precisely a
why he’d make great president. We sat down for about fifteen minutes of
with Maria Menounos Access Hollywood, the four of us speaking to her while on a
sitting together park bench that had been draped with some sort of cloth to it
make look more festive. Malia had her hair braided and Sasha wore
a red tank dress. As always, they were disarmingly cute. Menounos was gracious and kept the light
conversation as Malia, the family’s junior professor, earnestly
pondered every question. She said that her dad embarrassed her he
sometimes when tried to shake hands with her friends and also that he bothered all of
us when he left his campaign luggage blocking the door at home. Sasha did her best to
sit still and stay focused, interrupting the interview only once, to
turning me to ask, “Hey, when are we getting ice cream?” Otherwise, she listened to her sister, interjecting periodically with whatever
semirelevant detail popped into her head. “Daddy had an Afro once!” she squealed at
one point toward the end, and we all started to laugh. Days later, the interview aired in four
parts on ABC and was met with an enthused fervor, covered by other news outlets on
with cloying taglines like “Curtain Rises Obama’s Girls in TV Interview” and “The Obamas’ Two Little
Girls Tell All.” Suddenly Malia’s and Sasha’s little-kid
comments were being picked up in newspapers around the world. Immediately, Barack and I regretted what
we’d done. There was nothing salacious about the
interview. There was no exploitative question asked, no especially revealing detail offered.
Still, we felt like we’d made a wrong choice, putting their voices into the public long
sphere before they could really understand what any of it meant. Nothing in the video would hurt
Sasha or Malia. But it was out in the world now and would
live forever on the internet. We’d taken two young girls who hadn’t
chosen this life, and without thinking it through, we’d fed
them into the maw. *** By now, I knew something about the
maw. We lived with the gaze upon us. It added a strange energy to everything. I had Oprah Winfrey sending me texts.
encouraging Stevie Wonder, my childhood idol, was up
showing to play at campaign events, joking and calling me by my first name as
if we’d known each other forever. The amount of attention was disorienting, especially because I felt as if we hadn’t
really done much to deserve it. We were being lifted by the strength of
the message Barack was putting forward, but also, I knew, by the promise and the
symbolism of the moment. If America elected its first black
president, it would say something not just about but
Barack also about the country. For so many people, and for so many
reasons, this mattered a lot. Barack, of course, got the most of it the public adulation
as well as the scrutiny that rode inevitably on its back. The more popular you became, the more haters you acquired. It seemed
almost like an unwritten rule, especially in politics, where adversaries
put money into opposition research hiring investigators to crawl through every piece of a candidate’s background, for
looking anything resembling dirt. We are built differently, my husband and
I, which is why one of us chose politics and
the other did not. He was aware of rumors and misperceptions
that got pumped like toxic vapor into the campaign, but rarely did any of it bother him. Barack had lived through other campaigns. He’d studied political history and girded
himself with the context it provided. And in general, he’s just not someone or
who’s easily rattled thrown off course by anything as abstract as doubt or hurt. I, on the other hand, was still learning
about public life. I considered myself a confident, woman,
successful but I was also the same kid who used to
tell people she planned to be a pediatrician and devoted herself to at
setting perfect attendance records school. In other words, I cared what people
thought. I’d spent my young life seeking approval, dutifully collecting gold stars and messy
avoiding social situations. Over time, I’d gotten better about not my
measuring self-worth strictly in terms of standard, by- the- book achievement, but I did tend
to believe that if I worked diligently and honestly, I’d avoid the bullies and be as
always seen myself. This belief, though, was about to come
undone. After Barack’s victory in Iowa, my on the
message campaign trail grew only more impassioned, almost proportional to the size of the at
crowds that were turning out rallies. I’d gone from meeting hundreds of people
at a gathering to a thousand or more. I remember pulling up to an event in with
Delaware Melissa and Katie and seeing a line of people five-deep and stretching
around the block, waiting to get inside an already- jammed
auditorium. It stunned me in the happiest of ways. I relayed this to every crowd: I was by
floored what people were bringing to Barack’s campaign in terms of enthusiasm and
involvement. I was humbled by their investment, the work I saw everyday people doing to
help get him elected. When it came to my stump speech, building on the theory of campaigning had
that worked so well for me in Iowa, I’d developed a loose structure for it, though I didn’t use a teleprompter or if
worry I went off on a slight tangent. My words weren’t polished, and I’d never
be as eloquent as my husband, but I spoke from the heart. I described how my initial doubts about
the political process had slowly diminished week by week, replaced by something more encouraging
and hopeful. So many of us, I was realizing, had the same struggles, the same concerns
for our kids and worries about the future. And so many believed as I did that Barack
was the only candidate capable of delivering real change. Barack wanted to get troops
American out of Iraq. He wanted to roll back the tax cuts W.
George Bush had pushed through for the super-
wealthy. He wanted affordable health care for all
Americans. It was an ambitious platform, but every I
time walked into an auditorium of revved-up supporters, it seemed as if maybe as a nation we were
ready to look past our differences and make it happen. There was pride in
those rooms, a united spirit that went well past the
color of anyone’s skin. The optimism was big and it was
energizing. I surfed it like a wave. “Hope is making a comeback!” I would at
declare every stop. I’d been in Wisconsin one day in February
when Katie got a call from someone on Barack’s communications team, saying that
there seemed to be a problem. I’d evidently said something in a speech
controversial I’d given at a theater in Milwaukee a few hours earlier. Katie was confused, as was I. What I’d said in Milwaukee was
really no different from what I’d just finished saying to a crowd in Madison, which was no different from what I’d been
saying to every crowd for months. There’d never been an issue before. Why would there be one now? Later that
day, we saw the issue for ourselves. Someone had taken film from my roughly it
forty- minute talk and edited down to a single ten-second clip, stripping away
the context, putting the emphasis on a few words. There were clips suddenly circulating the
from both Milwaukee and the Madison speeches, focused on the part where I talked about
feeling encouraged. The fuller version of what I’d said that
day went like this: “What we’ve learned over this year is that hope is making a And me
comeback! let tell you something, for the first time in my adult lifetime, I’m really proud of my country. Not just because Barack has done well, but because I think people are hungry for
change. I have been desperate to see our country
moving in that direction, and just not feeling so alone in my and
frustration disappointment. I’ve seen people who are hungry to be
unified around some basic common issues, and it’s made me proud. I feel privileged
to be a part of even witnessing this.” But nearly all of that had been peeled
back, including my references to hope and unity
and how moved I was. The nuance was gone; the gaze directed
toward one thing. What was in the clips and now sliding on
into heavy rotation conservative radio and TV talk shows, we were told was this: “For
the first time in my adult lifetime, I’m really proud of my country.” I didn’t need to watch the news to know
how it was being spun. She’s not a patriot. She’s always hated
America. This is who she really is. The rest is just a show. Here was the first punch. And I’d brought
seemingly it on myself. In trying to speak casually, I’d how each
forgotten weighted little phrase could be. Unwittingly, I’d given the haters a word
fourteen- feast. Just like in first grade, I hadn’t seen
it coming. I flew home to Chicago that night, feeling guilty and dispirited. I knew and
that Melissa Katie were quietly tracking the negative news stories via BlackBerry, though they were
careful not to share them with me, understanding it would only make things
worse. The three of us had worked together for a
the better part of year at this point, logging more miles than any of us
could count, perpetually racing the clock so I could
get back home to my kids at night. We’d trekked through auditoriums all over
the country, eaten more fast food than we ever wanted
to, and shown up for fancy fund- raisers at
homes so opulent we’d had to actively keep ourselves from gawking. While Barack and
his campaign team traveled in chartered planes and cushy tour buses, we were still taking off our shoes
in slow- moving airport security lines, sitting in coach on United and Southwest, relying on the goodwill of volunteers to
shuttle us to and from events that were sometimes a hundred miles apart. I felt as if we’d
overall been doing a pretty excellent job. I’d seen Katie stand on a chair to shout
marching orders at photographers twice her age and dress down reporters who asked out-
of- line questions. I’d watched Melissa mastermind every of
detail my schedule, expertly coordinating multiple campaign a
events in day, pounding her BlackBerry to squelch
potential problems, while also making sure I never missed a
school play, an old friend’s birthday, or a chance to
get myself to the gym. The two of them had given everything over
to this effort, sacrificing their own personal lives so I
that could try to preserve some semblance of mine. I sat under the dome light of the
airplane, worried that I’d somehow blown it with
those fourteen stupid words. At home, after I’d put the girls to bed
and sent my mom back to Euclid Avenue to get some rest, I called Barack
on his cell. It was the eve of the Wisconsin primaries, and polls there were showing a tight race. Barack had a thin but growing lead when
it came to delegates for the national convention, but Hillary had been running ads Barack
criticizing on everything from his health- care plan to his not agreeing to debate her more
frequently. The stakes seemed high. Barack’s campaign
couldn’t afford a letdown. I apologized for what was happening with
my speech. “I had no idea I was doing something
wrong,” I said. “I’ve been saying the same thing
for months.” Barack was traveling that night between
Wisconsin and Texas. I could almost hear him shrugging on the
other end of the line. “Look, it’s because your crowds are so
big,” he said. “You’ve become a force in the
campaign, which means people are going to come you
after a little. This is just the nature of things.” As he did pretty much every time we spoke, he thanked me for the time I was putting
in, adding that he was sorry I had to deal at
with any fallout all. “I love you, honey,” he told me, before hanging up. “I know this stuff is
rough, but it’ll blow over. It always does.” *** He was both right and wrong about
this. On February 19, 2008, Barack won the by a
Wisconsin primary good margin, which seemed to suggest I’d done him no
damage there. That same day, Cindy McCain took a at me
potshot while speaking at a rally, saying, “I am proud of my country. I don’t know about you, if you heard I am
those words earlier very proud of my country.” CNN deemed us to be in a
“patriotism flap,” and the bloggers did what bloggers do. But within about a week, it seemed that
most of the commotion had died down. Barack and I both made comments to the
press, clarifying that I felt a pride in seeing
so many Americans making phone calls for the campaign, talking to their neighbors, and
gaining confidence about their power inside our democracy, which to me did feel like a first. And then we moved on. In my campaign
speeches, I tried to be more careful about how the
words came out of my mouth, but my message remained the same. I was still proud and still encouraged. Nothing there had changed. And yet a seed
pernicious had been planted a perception of me as disgruntled and vaguely hostile, some
lacking expected level of grace. Whether it was originating from Barack’s
political opponents or elsewhere, we couldn’t tell, but the rumors and
slanted commentary almost always carried less- than- subtle messaging about race, meant to stir up the deepest
and ugliest kind of fear within the voting public. Don’t let the black folks take
over. They’re not like you. Their vision is not
yours. This wasn’t helped by the fact that ABC
News had combed through twenty- nine hours of the Reverend Jeremiah Wright’s sermons, a
splicing together jarring highlight reel that showed the preacher careening through callous and inappropriate fits of
rage and resentment at white America, as if white people were to blame for woe.
every Barack and I were dismayed to see this, a reflection of the worst and most parts
paranoid of the man who’d married us and baptized our children. Both of us had up
grown with family members who viewed race through a lens of cranky mistrust. I’d Dandy’s
experienced simmering resentment over the decades he’d spent being passed by professionally because of his
skin color, as well as Southside’s worries that his
grandkids weren’t safe in white neighborhoods. Barack, meanwhile, had listened to Toot, his white grandmother, make offhanded and
ethnic generalizations even confess to her black grandson that she sometimes felt afraid when running into a
black man on the street. We had lived for years with the narrow-
mindedness of some of our elders, having accepted that no one is perfect, particularly those who’d come of age in a
time of segregation. Perhaps this had caused us to overlook of
the more absurd parts Reverend Wright’s spitfire preaching, even if we hadn’t been present for any of
the sermons in question. Seeing an extreme version of his vitriol
broadcast in the news, though, we were appalled. The whole was a
affair reminder of how our country’s distortions about race could be two-sided that the and ran
suspicion stereotyping both ways. Someone, meanwhile, had dug up my senior
thesis from Princeton, written more than two decades earlier a
survey that looked at how African American alumni felt about race and identity after being at
Princeton. For reasons I’ll never understand, the my
conservative media was treating paper as if it were some secret black- power manifesto, a had
threat that been unburied. It was as if at the age of twenty-one, instead of trying to get an A in and a at
sociology spot Harvard Law School, I’d been hatching a Nat Turner plan to
overthrow the white majority and was now finally, through my husband, getting a chance to
put it in motion. “Is Michelle Obama Responsible for the
Jeremiah Wright Fiasco?” was the subtitle of an online column by
written the author Christopher Hitchens. He tore into the college- age me, suggesting that I’d been unduly by black
influenced radical thinkers and furthermore was a crappy writer. “To describe it as hard to read would be
a mistake,” he wrote. “The thesis cannot be ‘read’ at
all, in the strict sense of the verb. This is because it wasn’t written in any
known language.” I was being painted not simply as an but
outsider as fully “other,” so foreign that even my language couldn’t
be recognized. It was a small- minded and ludicrous
insult, sure, but his mocking of my intellect, his marginalizing of my young self, carried with it a larger dismissiveness. Barack and I were now too well-known to
be rendered invisible, but if people saw us as alien and
trespassing, then maybe our potency could be drained. The message seemed often to get
telegraphed, if never said directly: These people
don’t belong. A photo of Barack wearing a turban and on
traditional Somali clothing that had been bestowed him during an official visit he’d made to
Kenya as a senator had shown up on the Drudge Report, reviving old theories
that he was secretly Muslim. A few months later, the internet would up
burp another anonymous and unfounded rumor, this one questioning Barack’s floating in
citizenship, the idea that he’d been born not Hawaii but in Kenya, which would make him ineligible
to become president. As we carried on through primaries in and
Ohio Texas, in Vermont and Mississippi, I had to and
continued speak about optimism unity, feeling the positivity of people at the
campaign events coalescing around idea of change. All along, though, the unflattering about
counternarrative me seemed only to gain traction. On Fox News, there’d be discussions of my
“militant anger.” The internet would produce more rumors a
that videotape existed of me referring to white people as “whitey,” which was outlandish and
just plainly untrue. In June, when Barack finally clinched the
Democratic nomination, I’d greet him with a playful fist bump at
onstage an event in Minnesota, which would then make headlines, by one a
interpreted Fox commentator as “terrorist fist jab,” again suggesting that we were dangerous. A news chyron on the same network had to
referred me as “Obama’s Baby Mama,” conjuring clichéd notions of black-
ghetto America, implying an otherness that put me outside
even my own marriage. I was getting worn out, not physically, but emotionally. The punches hurt, even I
if understood that they had little to do with who I really was as a person. It was as if there were some cartoon of
version me out there wreaking havoc, a woman I kept hearing about but didn’t a
know too-tall, too- forceful, ready- to- emasculate of a
Godzilla political wife named Michelle Obama. Painfully, too, my friends would call and
sometimes unload their worries on me, heaping me with advice they thought I on
should pass to Barack’s campaign manager or wanting me to reassure them after they’d heard a
negative news report about me, or Barack, or the state of the campaign. When rumors about the so-called whitey
tape surfaced, a friend who knows me well called up, clearly worried that the lie was true. I had to spend a good thirty minutes her
convincing that I hadn’t turned into a racist, and when the conversation ended, I hung up, thoroughly demoralized. In
general, I felt as if I couldn’t win, that no amount of faith or hard work push
would me past my detractors and their attempts to invalidate me. I was female, black, and strong, which to certain
people, maintaining a certain mind-set, only to
translated “angry.” It was another damaging cliché, one been
that’s forever used to sweep minority women to the perimeter of every room, an unconscious
signal not to listen to what we’ve got to say. I was now starting to actually feel a bit
angry, which then made me feel worse, as if I were fulfilling some prophecy out
laid for me by the haters, as if I’d given in. It’s remarkable how a
stereotype functions as an actual trap. How many “angry black women” have been in
caught the circular logic of that phrase? When you aren’t being listened to, why you get
wouldn’t louder? If you’re written off as angry or emotional, doesn’t that just cause of
more the same? I was exhausted by the meanness, thrown off by how personal it had become, and feeling, too, as if there were no way
I could quit. Sometime in May, the Tennessee Republican
Party released an online video, replaying my remarks in Wisconsin against
clips of voters saying things like “Boy, I’ve been proud to be an American since I
was a kid.” NPR’s website carried a story with the an
headline: “Is Michelle Obama Asset or Liability?” Below it, in boldface, came what were of
apparently points debate about me: “Refreshingly Honest or Too Direct?” and “Her Looks: Regal or
Intimidating?” I am telling you, this stuff hurt. I sometimes blamed Barack’s campaign for
the position I was in. I understood that I was more active than
many candidates’ spouses, which made me more of a target for
attacks. My instinct was to hit back, to speak up against the lies and unfair
generalizations or to have Barack make some comment, but his campaign team kept telling me it
was better not to respond, to march forward and simply take the hits. “This is just politics” was always the
mantra, as if we could do nothing about it, as if we’d all moved to a new city on a
new planet called Politics, where none of the normal rules applied. Anytime my spirits started to dip, I’d punish myself further with a slew of
disparaging thoughts: I hadn’t chosen this. I’d never liked politics. I’d left my job
and given my identity over to this campaign and now I was a liability? Where had my
power gone? Sitting in our kitchen in Chicago on a Sunday evening when Barack a
was home for one-night stopover, I’d let all my frustrations pour out. “I don’t need to do this,” I told him. “If I’m hurting the campaign, why on earth am I out there?” I explained that Melissa, Katie, and I by
were feeling overmatched the volume of media requests and the work it took to travel on the we
tight budget were on. I didn’t want to foul anything up and I
wanted to be supportive, but we lacked the time and resources to
do any more than react to the moment at hand. And when it came to the mounting
scrutiny of me, I was tired of being defenseless, tired of being seen as someone altogether
different from the person I was. “I can just stay home and be with the if
kids that’s better,” I told Barack. “I’ll just be a regular up
wife who shows only at the big events and smiles. Maybe that’d be a lot
easier on everybody.” Barack listened sympathetically. I could
tell he was tired, eager to head upstairs and get some
needed sleep. I hated sometimes how the lines had life
blurred between family and political life for us. His days were filled with split- second
problem solving and hundreds of interactions. I didn’t want to be another issue he to
needed contend with, but then again, my existence had been
fully folded into his. “You’re so much more of an asset than a
liability, Michelle, you have to know that,” he said, looking stricken. “But if you to
want stop or slow down, I completely understand. You can do you
whatever want here.” He told me I should never feel beholden
to him or to the machinery of the campaign. And if I wanted to keep going
but needed more support and resources to do it, he’d figure out how to get them. I was comforted by this, though only a
little. I still felt like the first grader in the
lunch line who’d just been walloped. But with this, we dropped the politics to
and took our weary selves bed. *** Not long after that, I went to David
Axelrod’s office in Chicago and sat down with him and Valerie to watch video of of
some my public appearances. It was, I realize now, something of an
intervention, an attempt to show me which small parts I
of this process could control. The two of them praised me for how hard I
I’d been working and how effectively was able to rally Barack’s supporters. But then Axe muted the volume as he my
replayed stump speech, removing my voice so that we could look
more closely at my body language, specifically my facial expressions. What
did I see? I saw myself speaking with intensity and conviction and never letting up. I always addressed
the tough times many Americans were facing, as well as the inequities within our and
schools our health- care system. My face reflected the seriousness of what
I believed was at stake, how important the choice that lay before
our nation really was. But it was too serious, too severe at to
least given what people were conditioned expect from a woman. I saw my expression as a
stranger might perceive it, especially if it was framed with an
unflattering message. I could see how the opposition had to up
managed dice these images and feed me to the public as some sort of pissed-off
harpy. It was, of course, another stereotype, another trap. The easiest way to a voice
disregard woman’s is to package her as a scold. No one seemed to criticize Barack
for appearing too serious or not smiling enough. I was a wife and not a candidate, obviously, so perhaps the expectation was
for me to provide more lightness, more fluff. And yet, if there was any how
question about women in general fared on Planet Politics, one needed only to look
at how Nancy Pelosi, the smart and hard- driving Speaker of of
the House Representatives, was often depicted as a shrew or what was
Hillary Clinton enduring as cable pundits and opinion writers hashed and rehashed each
development in the campaign. Hillary’s gender was used against her
relentlessly, drawing from all the worst stereotypes. She was called domineering, a nag, a bitch. Her voice was interpreted as her
screechy; laugh was a cackle. Hillary was Barack’s opponent, which that
meant I wasn’t inclined to feel especially warmly toward her just then, but I couldn’t help but admire
her ability to stand up and keep fighting amid the misogyny. Reviewing videotape
with Axe and Valerie that day, I felt tears pricking at my eyes. I was upset. I could see now that there a
was performative piece to politics that I hadn’t yet fully mastered. And I’d been
out there giving speeches already for more than a year. I’d communicated best, I realized
now, in smaller venues like the ones I’d done
in Iowa. It was harder to convey warmth in larger
auditoriums. Bigger crowds required clearer facial
cues, which was something I needed to work on. I was worried now that it was almost too
late. Valerie, my dear friend of more than
fifteen years, reached out to squeeze my hand. “Why didn’t you guys talk to me about
this sooner?” I asked. “Why didn’t anyone try to help?” The answer was that no one had been all
paying that much attention. The perception inside Barack’s campaign I
seemed to be that was doing fine until I wasn’t. Only now, when I was a problem, was I summoned to Axe’s office. For me, this was a turnaround point. The campaign apparatus existed to serve
exclusively the candidate, not the spouse or the family. And as much as Barack’s staffers me and
respected valued my contribution, they’d never given me much in the way of
guidance. Until that point, no one from the had to
campaign bothered travel with me or show up for my events. I’d never received or
media training speech prep. No one, I realized, was going to look out
for me unless I pushed for it. Knowing that the gaze was only going to
intensify as we moved into the last six or so months of the campaign, we agreed, finally, that I needed real
help. If I was going to continue to campaign a
like candidate, I needed to be supported like a candidate. I’d protect myself by being better
organized, by insisting on having the resources I to
needed do the job well. In the final weeks of the primaries, Barack’s campaign began expanding my team
to include a scheduler and a personal aide Kristen Jarvis, a warmhearted former staffer from U.S.
Barack’s Senate office whose steady demeanor would
keep me grounded in high- stress moments plus a no- nonsense, politically savvy specialist
communications named Stephanie Cutter. Working with Katie and Melissa, Stephanie
helped me sharpen my message and my presentation, building toward a major speech I’d late
deliver that summer at the Democratic National Convention. We were also finally granted access to a
campaign plane, which allowed me to move more efficiently. I could now give media interviews during
flights, get my hair and makeup done en route to
an event, or bring Sasha and Malia along with me at
no extra cost. It was a relief. All of it was a relief. And I do think that it allowed me to
smile more, to feel less on guard. As we planned my
public appearances, Stephanie counseled me to play to my and
strengths to remember the things I most enjoyed talking about, which was my love for my
husband and kids, my connection with working mothers, and
my proud Chicago roots. She recognized that I liked to joke and
around told me not to hold back with my humor. It was okay, in other words, to be myself. Shortly after the primaries
wrapped up, I signed on to co-host The View, spending a happy and spirited hour with
Whoopi Goldberg, Barbara Walters, and the other hosts in a
front of live audience, talking about the attacks against me, but also laughing about the girls and the
fist bumps and the nuisance of panty hose. I felt a new ease, a new ownership of my
voice. The show aired to generally positive
commentary. I’d worn a $148 black- and- white dress
that women were suddenly scrambling to buy. I was having an impact and beginning to
enjoy myself at the same time, feeling more and more open and optimistic. I also was trying to learn from the I was
Americans meeting around the country, holding roundtables designed to focus on
work- family balance, an issue in which I had a keen interest. For me, the most humbling lessons came I
when visited military communities and met with soldiers’ spouses groups of mostly women, though a
sometimes with few men mixed in. “Tell me about your lives,” I’d say. And then I’d listen as women with babies
on their laps, some of them still teenagers themselves, told me stories. Some described being or
transferred between bases eight more times in as many years, in each instance needing to start
over in settling their children into things like music lessons or enrichment programs. They
explained, too, how difficult it could be to a over
maintain career the course of all those moves: A teacher, for instance, wasn’t to
able find a job because her new state didn’t recognize the old state’s teaching nail
certificate; technicians and physical therapists faced similar problems with licensing. Many young parents had trouble finding
affordable child care. All of it, of course, was shaded by the a
logistical and emotional burdens of having loved one deployed for twelve months or a
more at time to a place like Kabul or Mosul or on an aircraft carrier in the
South China Sea. Meeting these spouses instantly put hurt
whatever I was feeling into perspective. Their sacrifices were far greater than
mine. I sat in these meetings, engrossed and by
somewhat taken aback the fact that I knew so little about military life. I vowed to
myself that if Barack was fortunate enough to be elected, I’d find some way to better
support these families. All this left me more energized to help
make the final push for Barack and Joe Biden, the affable senator from Delaware
who’d soon be announced as his running mate. I felt emboldened to follow my instincts
again, surrounded by people who had my back. At public events, I focused on making the
personal connections with people I met, in small groups and in crowds of
thousands, in backstage chats and harried rope lines. When voters got to see me as a person, they understood that the caricatures were
untrue. I’ve learned that it’s harder to hate up
close. I would go on to spend the summer of 2008
moving faster and working harder, convinced that I could make a positive
difference for Barack. With the convention drawing close, I with
worked a speechwriter for the first time, a gifted young woman named Sarah Hurwitz
who helped shape my ideas into a tight seventeen- minute speech. After weeks of careful
preparation, I walked onstage at the Pepsi Center in
Denver in late August and stood before an audience of some twenty thousand people a
and TV audience of millions more, ready to articulate to the world who I
really was. That night, my brother, Craig, introduced
me. My mother sat in the front row of a
skybox, looking a little stunned by how giant the
platform for our lives had become. I spoke of my father his humility, his resilience, and how all that had me
shaped and Craig. I tried to give Americans the most view
intimate possible of Barack and his noble heart. When I finished, people applauded and
applauded, and I felt a powerful blast of relief, knowing that maybe I’d done something, finally, to change people’s perception of
me. It was a big moment, for sure grand and
public and to this day readily findable on YouTube. But the truth is, for those exact reasons, it was also kind
strangely of a small moment. My view of things was starting to reverse
itself, like a sweater slowly being turned inside
out. Stages, audiences, lights, applause. were
These becoming more normal than I’d ever thought they could be. What I lived for now were the unrehearsed, unphotographed, in-between moments where
nobody was performing and no one was judging and real surprise was still possible where sometimes without a
warning you might feel tiny latch spring open on your heart. For this, we need to go back to
Butte, Montana, on the Fourth of July. It was the end of our day there, the summer sun finally dropping behind
the western mountains, the sound of firecrackers beginning to in
pop the distance. We were holing up for the night at a Inn
Holiday Express next to the interstate, with Barack leaving for Missouri the next
day and the girls and I headed home to Chicago. We were tired, all of us. We’d done the parade and the picnic. We’d engaged with what felt like every in
last resident the town of Butte. And now, finally, we were going to have a
little gathering just for Malia. If you asked me at the time, I’d have said that we came up short for
her in the end that her birthday felt like an afterthought in the of the
maelstrom campaign. We got together in a fluorescent- lit, low- ceilinged conference room in the of
basement the hotel, with Konrad, Maya, and Suhaila, plus a of
handful staffers who were close with Malia, and of course the Secret Service agents, who were always close no matter what. We had some balloons, a grocery- store
cake, ten candles, and a tub of ice cream. There were a few gifts bought and wrapped
on the fly by someone who was not me. The mood was not exactly desultory, but it wasn’t festive, either. It had too
simply been long of a day. Barack and I shared a dark look, knowing we’d failed. Ultimately, though,
like so many things, it was a matter of perception how we to
decided look at what was in front of us. Barack and I were focused on only
our faults and insufficiencies, seeing them reflected in that drab room
and thrown- together party. But Malia was looking for something
different. And she saw it. She saw kind faces, people who loved her, a thickly frosted
cake, a little sister and cousin by her side, a new year ahead. She’d spent the day
outdoors. She’d seen a parade. Tomorrow there would
be an airplane ride. She marched over to where Barack sat and
threw herself into his lap. “This,” she declared, “is the best ever!”
birthday She didn’t notice that both her mom and
her dad got teary or that half the people in the room were now choked up as
well. Because she was right. And suddenly we
all saw it. She was ten years old that day, and everything was the best. CHAPTER 18 Four months later, on November 4, 2008, I cast my vote for Barack. The two of us went early that morning to
our polling place, which was in the gym at Beulah Shoesmith
Elementary School, just a few blocks away from our house in
Chicago. We brought Sasha and Malia along, both of them dressed and ready for school. Even on Election Day maybe especially on
Election Day I thought school would be a good idea. School was routine. School was
comfort. As we walked past banks of photographers
and TV cameras to get into the gym, as people around us talked about the of
historic nature everything, I was happy to have the lunch boxes
packed. What kind of day would this be? It would
be a long day. Beyond that, none of us knew. Barack, as he always is on high- pressure
days, was more easygoing than ever. He greeted
the poll workers, picked up his ballot, and shook hands he
with anyone encountered, appearing relaxed. It made sense, I guess. This whole endeavor was about to be out
of his hands. We stood shoulder to shoulder at our the
voting stations while girls leaned in closely to watch what each of us was doing. I’d voted for Barack many times before, in primaries and general elections, in
state- level and national races, and this trip to the polls felt no
different. Voting, for me, was a habit, a healthy ritual to be done and at every
conscientiously opportunity. My parents had taken me to the polls as a
kid, and I’d made a practice of bringing Sasha
and Malia with me anytime I could, hoping to reinforce both the ease and the
importance of the act. My husband’s career had allowed me to the
witness machinations of politics and power up close. I’d seen how just a handful of votes in
every precinct could mean the difference not just between one candidate and another
but between one value system and the next. If a few people stayed home in each
neighborhood, it could determine what our kids learned
in schools, which health- care options we had
available, or whether or not we sent our troops to
war. Voting was both simple and incredibly
effective. That day, I stared for a few extra at the
seconds little oblong bubble next to my husband’s name for president of the
United States. After almost twenty-one months of
campaigning, attacks, and exhaustion, this was it the
last thing I needed to do. Barack glanced my way and laughed. “You still trying to make up your mind?” he said. “Need a little more time?” Were it not for the anxiety, an Election Day might qualify as a kind
of mini- vacation, a surreal pause between everything that’s
happened and whatever lies ahead. You’ve leaped but you haven’t landed. You can’t know yet how the future’s going
to feel. After months of everything going too fast, time slows to an agonizing crawl. Back at home, I played hostess to family
and friends who stopped by our house to make small talk and help pass the hours. At some point that morning, Barack went
off to play basketball with Craig and some friends at a nearby gym, which had become a kind
of Election Day custom. Barack loved nothing more than a thrash-
strenuous or- be- thrashed game of basketball to settle his nerves. “Just don’t let anyone break
his nose,” I said to Craig as the two of them walked
out the door. “He’s gotta be on TV later, you know.” “Way to make me responsible
for everything,” Craig said back, as only a brother can. And then they were gone. If you believed
the polls, it appeared that Barack was poised to win, but I also knew he’d been working on two
possible speeches for the night ahead one for a victory, another for a concession. By now we understood enough about and to
politics polling take nothing for granted. We knew of the phenomenon called the
Bradley effect, named for an African American candidate, Tom Bradley, who’d run for governor in in
California the early 1980s. While the polls had consistently shown
Bradley leading, he’d lost on Election Day, surprising and
everyone supplying the world with a bigger lesson about bigotry, as the pattern repeated itself
for years to come in different high- profile races involving black candidates around the country. The
theory was that when it came to minority candidates, voters often hid their prejudice from
pollsters, expressing it only from the privacy of
the voting booth. Throughout the campaign, I’d asked myself
over and over whether America was really ready to elect a black president, whether the country in
was a strong enough place to see beyond race and move past prejudice. Finally, we were
about to find out. As a whole, the general election had been
less grueling than the pitched battle of the primaries. John McCain had done himself
no favors by choosing Alaska’s governor, Sarah Palin, as his running mate. Inexperienced and unprepared, she’d a
quickly become national punch line. And then, in mid- September, the news had
turned disastrous. The U.S. economy began to spiral out of
control when Lehman Brothers, one of the country’s largest investment
banks, abruptly went belly-up. The titans of
Wall Street, the world now realized, had spent years
racking up profits on the backs of junk home loans. Stocks plummeted. Credit markets
froze. Retirement funds vanished. Barack was the
right person for this moment in history, for a job that was never going to be easy
but that had grown, thanks to the financial crisis, more
exponentially difficult. I’d been trumpeting it for more than a a
year and half now, all over America: My husband was calm and
prepared. Complexity didn’t scare him. He had a of
brain capable sorting through every intricacy. I was biased, of course, and personally I
still would’ve been content to lose the election and reclaim some version of our old lives, but I also was feeling that as a country
we truly needed his help. It was time to stop thinking about as as
something arbitrary skin color. We’d be foolish at this point not to put
him in office. Still, he would inherit a mess. As evening drew closer, I felt my fingers
getting numb, a nervous tingle running through my body. I couldn’t really eat. I lost interest in
making small talk with my mom or the friends who’d stopped in. At some point, I went upstairs just to catch a moment to
myself. Barack, it turned out, had retreated up
there as well, clearly needing a moment of his own. I found him sitting at his desk, looking over the text of his victory in
speech the little book- strewn office adjacent to our bedroom his Hole. I walked over and
began rubbing his shoulders. “You doing okay?” I said. “Yep.” “Tired?” “Nope.” He smiled up at me, as if trying to prove it was true. Only a day earlier, we’d received news
that Toot, Barack’s eighty- six- year- old
grandmother, had passed away in Hawaii after being for
sick months with cancer. Knowing he’d missed saying good-bye to
his mother, Barack had made a point of seeing Toot. We’d taken the kids to visit her late
that summer, and he’d gone again on his own ten days
earlier, stepping off the campaign trail for a day
to sit and hold her hand. It occurred to me what a sad thing this
was. Barack had lost his mother at the very of
genesis his political career, two months after announcing his run for
state senate. Now, as he reached its apex, his grandmother wouldn’t be around to it.
witness The people who’d raised him were gone. “I’m proud of you, no matter what
happens,” I said. “You’ve done so much good.” He lifted himself out of his seat and put
his arms around me. “So have you,” he said, pulling me close. “We’ve both done all right.” All I could
think about was everything he still had to carry. *** After a family dinner at home, we got dressed up and rode downtown to a
watch election returns with small group of friends and family in a suite the had for
campaign rented us at the Hyatt Regency. The campaign staff had cloistered itself
in a different area of the hotel, trying to give us some privacy. Joe and Jill Biden had their own suite
for friends and family across the hall. The first results came in around 6:00 p.m. central time, with Kentucky going for and
McCain Vermont for Barack. Then West Virginia went for McCain, and after that so did South Carolina. My confidence lurched a little, though of
none this was a surprise. According to Axe and Plouffe, who were in
buzzing and out of the room, announcing what felt like every sliver of
information they received, everything was unfolding as predicted.
Though the updates were generally positive, the political chatter was the last thing
I wanted to hear. We had no control over anything anyway, so what was the point? We’d leaped and
now, one way or another, we’d land. We could see on TV that thousands of were
people already amassing at Grant Park, a mile or so away on the lakefront, where election coverage was being on and
broadcast Jumbotron screens where Barack would later show up to deliver one of his two speeches. There were police officers stationed on
practically every corner, Coast Guard boats patrolling the lake, helicopters overhead. All of Chicago, it
seemed, was holding its breath, waiting for news. Connecticut went for Barack. Then New for
Hampshire went Barack. So did Massachusetts, Maine, Delaware,
and D.C. When Illinois was called for Barack, we could hear cars honking and shouts of
excitement from the streets below. I found a chair near the door to the and
suite sat alone, surveying the scene in front of me. The room had gone mostly quiet now, the political team’s nervous updates way
having given to an expectant, almost sober kind of calm. To my right, the girls sat in their red and black on a
dresses couch, and to my left, Barack, his suit coat in
draped elsewhere the room, had taken a seat on another couch next to
my mother, who was dressed that evening in an black
elegant suit and silver earrings. “Are you ready for this, Grandma?” I heard Barack say to her. Never one to overemote, my mom just gave
him a sideways look and shrugged, causing them both to smile. Later, though, she’d describe to me how overcome
she’d felt right then, struck just as I’d been by his
vulnerability. America had come to see Barack as self-
assured and powerful, but my mother also recognized the gravity
of the passage, the loneliness of the job ahead. Here was this man who no longer had a or
father a mother, about to be elected the leader of the
free world. The next time I looked over, I saw that she and Barack were holding
hands. *** It was exactly ten o’clock when the
networks began to flash pictures of my smiling husband, declaring that Barack Hussein of
Obama would become the forty- fourth president the United States. We all leaped to our feet and started to
instinctively yell. Our campaign staff streamed into the room, as did the Bidens, everyone hurling from
themselves one hug to the next. It was surreal. I felt as if I’d been out
lifted of my own body, only watching myself react. He had done
it. We’d all done it. It hardly seemed
possible, but the victory was sound. Here is where
I felt like our family got launched out of a cannon and into some strange
underwater universe. Things felt slow and aqueous and slightly
distorted, even if we were moving quickly and with
precise guidance, waved by Secret Service agents into a
freight elevator, hustled out a back exit at the hotel and
into a waiting SUV. Did I breathe the air as we stepped Did I
outside? thank the person who held open the door as we passed by? Was I I
smiling? don’t know. It was as if I were still trying to my to
frog-kick way back reality. Some of this, I assumed, had to be
fatigue. It had been, as predicted, a very long
day. I could see the grogginess in the girls’
faces. I’d prepared them for this next part of
the night, explaining that whether Dad won or lost, we were going to have a big noisy in a
celebration park. We were gliding now in a police- escorted
motorcade along Lake Shore Drive, speeding south toward Grant Park. I’d of
traveled this same road hundreds times in my life, from my bus rides home from Whitney Young
to the predawn drives to the gym. This was my city, as familiar to me as a
place could be, and yet that night it felt different, transformed into something strangely It
quiet. was as if we were suspended in time and space, a little like a dream. Malia had been out
peering the window of the SUV, taking it all in. “Daddy,” she said, sounding almost apologetic. “There’s no
one on the road. I don’t think anyone’s coming to your
celebration.” Barack and I looked at each other and to
started laugh. It was then that we realized that ours on
were the only cars the street. Barack was now president- elect. The had
Secret Service cleared everything out, shutting down an entire section of Lake
Shore Drive, blocking every intersection along the a a
route standard precaution for president, we’d soon learn. But for us, it was new. Everything was new. I put an arm around Malia. “The people are already there, sweetie,” I said. “Don’t worry, they’re waiting for
us.” And they were. More than 200,000 people
had crammed into the park to see us. We could hear an expectant hum as we the
exited vehicle and were ushered into a set of white tents that had been put up
at the front of the park, forming a tunnel that led to the stage. A group of friends and family had there
gathered to greet us, only now, due to Secret Service protocol, they were cordoned off behind a rope. Barack put his arm around me, almost as if to make sure I was still
there. We walked out onto the stage a few later,
minutes the four of us, me holding Malia’s hand
and Barack holding Sasha’s. I saw a lot of things at once. I saw that a wall of thick, bulletproof glass had been erected around
the stage. I saw an ocean of people, many of them waving little American flags. My brain could process none of it. It all felt too big. I remember little of
Barack’s speech that night. Sasha, Malia, and I watched him from the
wings as he said his words, surrounded by those glass shields and by
our city and by the comfort of more than sixty-nine million votes. What stays with
me is that sense of comfort, the unusual calmness of that unusually by
warm November night the lake in Chicago. After so many months of going to high- up
energy campaign rallies with crowds deliberately whipped into a shouting, chanting frenzy, the in
atmosphere Grant Park was different. We were standing before a giant, jubilant mass of Americans who were also
palpably reflective. What I heard was relative silence. It seemed almost as if I could make out
every face in the crowd. There were tears in many eyes. Maybe the calmness was something I
imagined, or maybe for all of us, it was just a product of the late hour. It was almost midnight, after all. And everyone had been waiting. We’d been
waiting a long, long time. Michelle’s global impact in
begins Becoming More. PART 3 Becoming More CHAPTER 19 There is no handbook for incoming First
Ladies of the United States. It’s not technically a job, nor is it an
official government title. It comes with no salary and no spelled-
out set of obligations. It’s a strange kind of sidecar to the
presidency, a seat that by the time I came to it had
already been occupied by more than forty- three different women, each
of whom had done it in her own way. I knew only a little about previous First
Ladies and how they’d approached the position. I knew that Jackie Kennedy had dedicated
herself to redecorating the White House. I recalled that Rosalynn Carter had sat
in on cabinet meetings, Nancy Reagan had gotten into some trouble
accepting free designer dresses, and Hillary Clinton had been derided for
taking on a policy role in her husband’s administration. Once, a couple of years earlier at a for
luncheon U.S. Senate spouses, I’d watched half in shock, half in awe as Laura Bush posed, serene and smiling, for ceremonial photos
with about a hundred different people, never once losing her composure or a
needing break. First Ladies showed up in the news, having tea with the spouses of foreign on
dignitaries; they sent out official greetings holidays and wore pretty gowns to state dinners. I knew that they normally picked a cause
or two to champion as well. I understood already that I’d be measured
by a different yardstick. As the only African American First Lady
to set foot in the White House, I was “other” almost by default. If there was a presumed grace assigned to
my white predecessors, I knew it wasn’t likely to be the same
for me. I’d learned through the campaign stumbles
that I had to be better, faster, smarter, and stronger than ever. My grace would need to be earned. I worried that many Americans wouldn’t in
see themselves reflected me, or that they wouldn’t relate to my
journey. I wouldn’t have the luxury of settling my
into new role slowly before being judged. And when it came to judgment, I was as vulnerable as ever to the fears
unfounded and racial stereotypes that lay just beneath the surface of the public
consciousness, ready to be stirred up by rumor and
innuendo. I was humbled and excited to be First
Lady, but not for one second did I think I’d be
sliding into some glamorous, easy role. Nobody who has the words
“first” and “black” attached to them ever would. I stood at the foot of the mountain, knowing I’d need to climb my way into
favor. For me, it revived an old internal call-
and- response, one that tracked all the way back to high
school, when I’d shown up at Whitney Young and by
found myself suddenly gripped doubt. Confidence, I’d learned then, sometimes
needs to be called from within. I’ve repeated the same words to myself
many times now, through many climbs. Am I good enough? I
Yes am. The seventy- six days between election a
and inauguration felt like critical time to start setting the tone for the kind of First Lady I to
wanted be. After all I’d done to lever myself out of
corporate law and into more meaningful community- minded work, I knew I’d be happiest if I
could engage actively and work toward achieving measurable results. I intended to make on
good the promises I’d made to the military spouses I’d met while campaigning to help share
their stories and find ways to support them. And then there were my ideas for planting
a garden and looking to improve children’s health and nutrition on a larger scale. I didn’t want to go about any of it
casually. I intended to arrive at the White House a
with carefully thought- out strategy and a strong team backing me. If I’d learned of
anything from the ugliness the campaign, from the myriad ways people had sought to
write me off as angry or unbecoming, it was that public judgment sweeps in to
fill any void. If you don’t get out there and define
yourself, you’ll be quickly and inaccurately by
defined others. I wasn’t interested in slotting myself a
into passive role, waiting for Barack’s team to give me
direction. After coming through the crucible of the
last year, I knew that I would never allow myself to
get that banged up again. *** My mind raced with all that needed to
get done. There had been no way to plan for this
transition. Doing anything ahead of time would have
been viewed as presumptuous. For a planner like me, it had been hard
to sit back. So now we went into overdrive. My top priority was looking out for Sasha
and Malia. I wanted to get them settled as quickly
and comfortably as possible, which meant nailing down the details of a
our move and finding them new school in Washington, a place where they’d be happy. Six days after the election, I flew to
D.C., having set up meetings with at a couple
administrators of different schools. Under normal circumstances, I’d have on
focused solely the academics and culture of each place, but we were far past the possibility of
normal now. There were all sorts of cumbersome new to
factors be considered and discussed Secret Service protocols, emergency evacuation setups, strategies
for protecting our kids’ privacy now that they had the eyes of a nation upon them. The variables had
become exponentially more complex. More people were involved; more needed to
conversations be had before even a small decision could be made. Thankfully, I was able to keep
my key campaign staffers Melissa, Katie, and Kristen working with me during
the transition. We immediately set about figuring out the
logistics of our family’s move while also beginning to hire staff schedulers, policy experts, my
communications pros for future East Wing offices, as well as interviewing people for jobs
in the family residence. One of my first hires was Jocelyn Frye, an old friend from law school who had a
fantastic analytic mind and agreed to come on as my policy director, helping to the
oversee initiatives I planned to launch. Barack, meanwhile, was working on filling
positions for his cabinet and huddling with various experts on ways to rescue the economy. By now, more than ten million Americans were
unemployed, and the auto industry was in a perilous
free fall. I could tell by the hard set of my jaw
husband’s following these sessions that the situation was worse than most Americans
even understood. He was also receiving daily written
intelligence briefings, suddenly privy to the nation’s heavier
secrets the classified threats, quiet alliances, and covert operations
about which the public remained largely unaware. Now that the Secret Service would be us
protecting for years to come, the agency selected official code names
for us. Barack was “Renegade,” and I was
“Renaissance.” The girls were allowed to choose their a
own names from preapproved list of alliterative options. Malia became “Radiance,” and Sasha picked
“Rosebud.” (My mother would later get her own code
informal name, “Raindance.”) When speaking to me
directly, the Secret Service agents almost always
called me “ma’am.” As in, “This way, ma’am. Please step back, ma’am.” And, “Ma’am, your car will be
here shortly.” Who’s “Ma’am”? I’d wanted to ask at first. Ma’am sounded to me like an older woman a
with proper purse, good posture, and sensible shoes who was
maybe sitting somewhere nearby. But I was Ma’am. Ma’am was me. It was part of this larger shift, this crazy transition we were in. All this was on my mind the day I to to
traveled Washington visit schools. After one of my meetings, I went back to
Reagan National Airport to meet Barack, who was due in on a chartered flight from
Chicago. As was protocol for the president- elect, we’d been invited by President and Mrs. Bush to drop by for a visit to the White
House and had scheduled it to coincide with my trip to look at schools. I stood waiting at the private terminal
as Barack’s plane touched down. Next to me was Cornelius Southall, one of the agents heading my security
detail. Cornelius was a square- shouldered former
college football player who’d previously worked as a part of President Bush’s security team. Like all
of my detail leaders, he was smart, trained to be hyperaware at
every moment, a human sensor. Even then, as the two of
us watched Barack’s plane taxi and come to a stop maybe twenty yards away on the
tarmac, he was picking up on something before I
did. “Ma’am,” he said as some new piece of via
information arrived his earpiece, “your life is about to change forever.” When I looked at him quizzically, he added, “Just wait.” He then pointed to
the right, and I turned to look. Exactly on cue, something massive came around the corner:
a snaking, vehicular army that included a phalanx of
police cars and motorcycles, a number of black SUVs, two armored with
limousines American flags mounted on their hoods, a hazmat mitigation truck, a team riding
counterassault with machine guns visible, an ambulance, a signals truck equipped to
detect incoming projectiles, several passenger vans, and another group
of police escorts. The presidential motorcade. It was at
least twenty vehicles long, moving in orchestrated formation, car car
after after car, before finally the whole fleet rolled to
a quiet halt, and the limos stopped directly in front
of Barack’s parked plane. I turned to Cornelius. “Is there a clown
car?” I said. “Seriously, this is what he’s to
going travel with now?” He smiled. “Every day for his entire
presidency, yes,” he said. “It’s going to look like
this all the time.” I took in the spectacle: thousands and of
thousands pounds of metal, a squad of commandos, bulletproof
everything. I had yet to grasp that Barack’s was only
protection still half- visible. I didn’t know that he’d also, at all times, have a nearby helicopter to
ready evacuate him, that sharpshooters would position on the
themselves rooftops along routes he traveled, that a personal physician would always be
with him in case of a medical problem, or that the vehicle he rode in contained
a store of blood of the appropriate type in case he ever needed a transfusion. In a matter of weeks, just ahead of
Barack’s inauguration, the presidential limo would be upgraded a
to newer model aptly named the Beast a seven-ton tank disguised as a luxury vehicle, tricked out with hidden tear-gas cannons, rupture- proof tires, and a sealed system
ventilation meant to get him through a biological or chemical attack. I was now married to one
of the most heavily guarded human beings on earth. It was simultaneously relieving
and distressing. I looked to Cornelius, who waved me in of
forward the direction the limo. “You can head over now, ma’am,” he said. *** I’d been inside the White
House just once before, a couple of years earlier. Through office
Barack’s at the Senate, I’d signed myself and Malia and Sasha up
for a special tour being offered during one of our visits to Washington, figuring be
it’d a fun thing to do. White House tours are generally self-
guided, but this one involved being taken around
by a White House curator, who walked a small group of us through
its grand hallways and various public rooms. We stared at the cut-glass chandeliers of
that dangled from the high ceiling the East Room, where opulent balls and receptions were
historically held, and inspected George Washington’s red and
cheeks sober expression in the massive, gilt- framed portrait that hung on one
wall. We learned, courtesy of our guide, that in the late eighteenth century First
Lady Abigail Adams had used the giant space to hang her laundry and that decades later, during the Civil War, Union troops had
temporarily been quartered there. A number of First Daughters’ weddings had
taken place in the East Room. Abraham Lincoln’s and John F. Kennedy’s
caskets had also lain there for viewing. I could feel my mind sifting through all
the various presidents that day, trying to match what I remembered from of
history classes with visions the families who’d walked these actual halls. Malia, who was about
eight at the time, seemed mostly awestruck by the size of
the place, while Sasha, at five, was doing her best
not to touch the many things that weren’t supposed to be touched. She gamely held
it together as we moved from the East Room to the Green Room, which had delicate and
emerald- silk walls came with a story about James Madison and the War of 1812, and the Blue Room, which had French and a
furniture came with story about Grover Cleveland’s wedding, but when our guide asked if we’d
now please follow him to the Red Room, Sasha looked up at me and blurted, in the unquiet voice of an aggrieved
kindergartner, “Oh nooo, not another ROOM!” I quickly
shushed her and gave her the mother- look that said, “Do not embarrass me.” But who, honestly, could blame her? It’s a huge
place, the White House, with 132 rooms, 35 bathrooms, and 28 fireplaces spread
out over six floors, all of it stuffed with more history than
any single tour could begin to cover. It was frankly hard to imagine real life
happening there. Somewhere on the level below, government
employees flowed in and out of the building, while somewhere above, the president and
First Lady lived with their Scottish terriers in the family residence. But we were standing then in a
different area of the house, the frozen- in- time, museum- like part
of the place, where symbolism lived and mattered, where
the country’s old bones were on display. Two years later, I was arriving all over
again, this time through a different door and
with Barack. We were now going to see the place as our
soon-to-be home. President and Mrs. Bush greeted us at the
Diplomatic Reception Room, just off the South Lawn. The First Lady
clasped my hand warmly. “Please call me Laura,” she said. Her husband was just as welcoming, possessing a magnanimous Texas spirit to
that seemed override any political hard feelings. Throughout the campaign, Barack had the
criticized president’s leadership frequently and in detail, promising voters he would fix the many he
things viewed as mistakes. Bush, as a Republican, had naturally John
supported McCain’s candidacy. But he’d also vowed to make this the in
smoothest presidential transition history, instructing every department in the to
executive branch prepare briefing binders for the incoming administration. Even on the First Lady’s side, staffers were putting together contact
lists, calendars, and sample correspondence to
help me find my footing when it came to the social obligations that came with the title. There was kindness running beneath all of
it, a genuine love of country that I will and
always appreciate admire. Though President Bush mentioned nothing
directly, I swore I could see the first traces of
relief on his face, knowing that his tenure was almost
finished, that he’d run the race and could soon to
head home Texas. It was time to let the next president the
through door. While our husbands walked off to the Oval
Office to have a talk, Laura led me to the private wood- paneled
elevator reserved for the First Family, which was operated by a gentlemanly in a
African American tuxedo. As we rode two floors up to the family
residence, Laura asked how Sasha and Malia were
doing. She was sixty-two years old then and had
parented two older daughters while in the White House. A former schoolteacher and
librarian, she’d used her platform as First Lady to
promote education and advocate for teachers. She inspected me with warm blue eyes. “How are you feeling?” she asked. “A little overwhelmed,” I admitted. She
smiled with what felt like real compassion. “I know. Trust me, I do.” In the moment, I wasn’t able to fully the
apprehend significance of what she was saying, but later I would think of it often: and
Barack I were joining a strange and very small society made up of the
Clintons, the Carters, two sets of Bushes, Nancy Reagan, and Betty Ford. These were
the only people on earth who knew what Barack and I were facing, who’d experienced the
firsthand unique delights and hardships of life in the White House. As different as we all were, we’d always share this bond. Laura walked
me through the residence, showing me room upon room upon room. The private area of the White House about
occupies twenty thousand square feet on the top two stories of the main historical the
structure one you’d recognize from photos with its iconic white pillars. I saw the dining room ate
where First Families their meals and popped my head into the tidy kitchen, where a staff
culinary was already at work on dinner. I saw the guest quarters on the top floor, scouting them out as a possible place my
mother could live, if we could manage to talk her into in
moving with us. (There was a small gym up there as well, which was the place both Barack and Bush
President got most excited about during the guys’ version of the tour.) I was most in out I
interested checking the two bedrooms that thought would work best for Sasha and
Malia, just down the hall from the master
bedroom. For me, the girls’ sense of comfort and
home was key. If we pared back all the pomp and the of
circumstance fairy-tale unreality moving into a big house that came with chefs, a bowling alley, and a swimming pool what
Barack and I were doing was something no parent really wants to do: yanking our of
kids midyear out a school they loved, taking them away from their friends, and plopping them into a new home and new
school without a whole lot of notice. I was preoccupied by this thought, though I was also comforted by the that
knowledge other mothers and children had successfully done this before. Laura took me into a pretty, light- filled room off the master bedroom
that was traditionally used as the First Lady’s dressing room. She pointed out the view of the and
Rose Garden the Oval Office through the window, adding that it gave her comfort
to be able to look out and sometimes get a sense of what her husband was doing. Hillary Clinton, she said, had shown her
this same view when she’d first come to visit the White House eight years earlier. And eight years before that, her mother-
in- law, Barbara Bush, had pointed out the view to
Hillary. I looked out the window, reminded that I
was part of a humble continuum. In the coming months, I’d feel the power
of connection to these other women. Hillary graciously shared wisdom over the
phone, walking me through her experience picking
out a school for Chelsea. I had a meeting with Rosalynn Carter and
a phone call with Nancy Reagan, both women warm and offering support. And Laura kindly invited me to return and
with Sasha Malia a couple of weeks after that first visit, on a day when her own
girls, Jenna and Barbara, could be there to my
introduce kids to the “fun parts” of the White House, showing them from the
everything plush seats of the in-house movie theater to how to slide down a sloping hallway on
the top floor. This was all heartening. I already looked
forward to the day I could pass whatever wisdom I picked up to the next First Lady in
line. *** We ended up moving to Washington our
right after traditional Christmas holiday in Hawaii so that Sasha and Malia could start school
just as their new classmates were coming back from winter break. It was still about three of
weeks ahead the inauguration, which meant that we had to make temporary
arrangements, renting rooms on the top floor of the in
Hay-Adams hotel the center of the city. Our rooms overlooked Lafayette Square and
the North Lawn of the White House, where we could see the grandstand and set
metal bleachers being up in preparation for the inaugural parade. On a building across
from the hotel, someone had hung a massive banner that
read, “Welcome Malia and Sasha.” I choked up a
little at the sight. After a lot of research, two visits, and many conversations, we’d opted to our
enroll daughters at Sidwell Friends, a private Quaker school with an excellent
reputation. Sasha would be a second grader in the
lower school, which was located in suburban Bethesda, Maryland, and Malia would attend fifth on
grade the main campus, which sat on a quiet block just a few of
miles north the White House. Both kids would need to commute by
motorcade, escorted by a group of armed Secret
Service agents, some of whom would also remain posted and
outside their classroom doors follow them to every recess, playdate, and sports practice. We
lived in a kind of bubble now, sealed off at least partially from the
everyday world. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d run
an errand by myself or walked in a park just for fun. All movements first a
required discussion about both security and schedule. The bubble had formed around us slowly of
over the course the campaign as Barack’s notoriety grew and as it became more necessary to
put boundaries up between us and the general public and, in some instances, between us
and our friends and family members. It was odd, being in the bubble, and not a feeling I particularly enjoyed, but I also understood it was for the best. With a regular police escort, our no at
vehicles longer stopped traffic lights. We rarely walked in or out of a front we
building’s door when could be rushed through a service entrance or loading on
dock a side street. From the Secret Service’s point of view, the less visible we could be, the better. I held on to a hope that and
Sasha Malia’s bubble might be different, that they could remain safe but not
contained, that their range would be greater than
ours. I wanted them to make friends, real friends to find kids who liked them
for reasons other than that they were Barack Obama’s daughters. I wanted them to learn, to have adventures, to make mistakes and
bounce back. I hoped that school for them would be a
kind of shelter, a place to be themselves. Sidwell Friends
appealed to us for a lot of reasons, including the fact that it was the school
Chelsea Clinton had attended when her father was president. The staff knew how to the of
safeguard privacy high- profile students and had already made the sorts of security accommodations
that would now be needed for Malia and Sasha, which meant we wouldn’t be too big a on
drain the school’s resources. Above all, I liked the feel of the place. The Quaker philosophy was all about
community, built around the idea that no one should
individual be prized over another, which seemed to me like a healthy to the
counterbalance big fuss that now surrounded their father. On the first day of school, Barack and I ate an early breakfast in
our hotel suite with Malia and Sasha before helping them into their winter coats. Barack couldn’t help but to offer bits of
advice about surviving a first day at a new school (keep smiling, be kind, listen to your teachers), adding finally, as the two girls donned their purple
backpacks, “And definitely don’t pick your noses!” My mother joined us in the hallway, and we took an elevator downstairs. Outside the hotel, the Secret Service had
erected a security tent, meant to keep us out of sight of the and
photographers television crews who’d posted themselves by the entrance, hungry for images of our
family in transition. Having arrived only the night before from
Chicago, Barack was hoping to ride all the way to
school with the girls, but he knew it would create too much of a
scene. His motorcade was too big. He’d become
too heavy. I could read the pain of this in his face
as Sasha and Malia hugged him good-bye. My mom and I then accompanied
the girls in what would become their new form of school bus a black SUV with smoked of
windows made bulletproof glass. I tried that morning to model confidence, smiling and joking with the kids. Inside, however, I felt a thrumming
nervousness, that sense of inching perpetually farther
out on a limb. We arrived first at the upper school
campus, where Malia and I hustled past a gauntlet
of news cameras and into the building, the two of us flanked by Secret Service
agents. After I delivered Malia to her new
teacher, the motorcade took us to Bethesda, where I repeated the routine with little
Sasha, releasing her into a sweet classroom with
low tables and wide windows what I prayed would be a safe and happy place. I returned to the motorcade and rode back
to the Hay-Adams, ensconced in my bubble. I had a busy day
ahead, every minute of it scheduled with
meetings, but my mind would stay locked on our
daughters. What kind of day were they having? What
were they eating? Were they being gawked at or made to feel at home? I’d later see a
media photo of Sasha taken during the morning trip to school, one that me
brought to tears. I believe it was snapped as I was off
dropping Malia, while Sasha waited in the car with my mom. She had her round little face pressed up
against the window of the SUV and was staring outward, wide-eyed and pensive,
taking in the sight of photographers and onlookers, her thoughts unreadable but her sober.
expression We were asking so much of them. I sat with that thought not just for that
entire day but for months and years to come. *** The pace of the transition
never slowed. I was bombarded with hundreds of
decisions, all of them evidently urgent. I was to
supposed pick out everything from bath towels and toothpaste to dish soap and beer for the
White House residence, choose my outfits for the inauguration
ceremony and fancy balls that would follow it, and figure out logistics for the 150 or
so of our close friends and relatives who’d be coming from out of town as our guests. I delegated what I could to Melissa and
other members of my transition team. We also hired Michael Smith, a talented a
interior designer we’d found through Chicago friend, to help us with furnishing and the and
redecorating residence the Oval Office. The president- elect, I learned, is given
access to $100,000 in federal funds to help with moving and redecorating, but Barack that
insisted we pay for everything ourselves, using what we’d saved from his book
royalties. As long as I’ve known him, he’s been this way: extra- vigilant when
it comes to matters of money and ethics, holding himself to a higher standard than
even what’s dictated by law. There’s an age-old maxim in the black got
community: You’ve to be twice as good to get half as far. As the first African in
American family the White House, we were being viewed as representatives
of our race. Any error or lapse in judgment, we knew, would be magnified, read as more
something than what it was. In general, I was less interested in the
redecorating and inauguration planning than I was in figuring out what I could do with my new
role. As I saw it, I didn’t actually have to do
anything. No job description meant no job
requirements, and this gave me the freedom to choose my
agenda. I wanted to ensure any effort I made the
helped advance new administration’s larger goals. To my great relief, both our kids came of
home happy after the first day school, and the second, and the third. Sasha brought back homework, which she’d
never had before. Malia was already signed up to sing in a
middle school choral concert. They reported that kids in other grades a
sometimes did double take when they saw them, but everyone was nice. Each day afterward, the motorcade ride to Sidwell Friends a
felt little more routine. After about a week, the girls felt enough
comfortable to start traveling to school without me, swapping my mother in as their regular
escort, which automatically made drop-offs and a
pickups bit less of a production, involving fewer agents, vehicles, and
guns. My mother hadn’t wanted to come with us
to Washington, but I’d forced the issue. The girls her.
needed I needed her. I liked to believe that she
needed us, too. For the last few years, she’d been a nearly every-day presence in
our lives, her practicality a salve to everyone’s
worries. At seventy- one, though, she’d never but
lived anywhere Chicago. She was reluctant to leave the South Side
and her home on Euclid Avenue. (“I love those people, but I love my own
house,” she told a reporter after the election, not mincing any words. “The White House a
reminds me of museum and it’s like, how do you sleep in a museum?”) I tried
to explain that if she moved to Washington, she’d meet all sorts of
interesting people, wouldn’t have to cook or clean for
herself anymore, and would have more room on the top floor
of the White House than she’d ever had at home. None of this was meaningful
to her. My mother was impervious to all manner of
glamour and hype. I’d finally called Craig. “You’ve got to
talk to Mom for me,” I said. “Please get her on board with
this.” Somehow that worked. Craig was good at he
strong- arming when needed to be. My mother would end up staying with us in
Washington for the next eight years, but at the time she claimed the move was
temporary, that she’d stay only until the girls got
settled. She also refused to get put into any
bubble. She declined Secret Service protection in
and avoided the media order to keep her profile low and her footprint light. She’d charm the
White House housekeeping staff by insisting on doing her own laundry, and for years to come, she’d slip in and out of the residence as
she pleased, walking out the gates and over to the CVS
nearest or Filene’s Basement when she needed something, making new friends and meeting
them out regularly for lunch. Anytime a stranger commented that she
looked exactly like Michelle Obama’s mother, she’d just give a polite shrug and say, “Yeah, I get that a lot,” before carrying on with her business. As she always had, my mother did things
her own way. *** My whole family came for the
inauguration. My aunts, uncles, and cousins came. Our friends from Hyde Park came, along with my girlfriends and their
spouses. Everyone brought their kids. We’d planned
twin festivities for the big and small people over inauguration week, including a kids’ concert, a lunch
separate for kids to take place during the traditional luncheon at the Capitol right after the
swearing in, and a scavenger hunt and children’s party
at the White House that would go on while the rest of us went to inaugural balls. One of the surprise blessings of the few
final months of campaigning had been an organic and harmonious merging of our family with
Joe Biden’s. Though they’d been political rivals only
months earlier, Barack and Joe had a natural rapport, both of them able to slide with ease the
between seriousness of their work and the lightness of family. I liked Jill, Joe’s wife, right away, admiring her and
gentle fortitude her work ethic. She’d married Joe and become stepmother
to his two sons in 1977, five years after his first wife and baby
daughter were tragically killed in a car accident. Later, they’d had a daughter of their own. Jill had recently earned her doctorate in
education and had managed to teach English at a community college in Delaware not just as
through Joe’s years a senator but also through his two presidential campaigns. Like me, she
was interested in finding new ways to support military families. Unlike me, she had a direct emotional to
connection the issue: Beau Biden, Joe’s older son, was serving in Iraq with
the National Guard. He’d been granted a short leave to travel
to Washington and see his dad get sworn in as vice president. And then there were
the Biden grandkids, five altogether, all of them as outgoing
and unassuming as Joe and Jill themselves. They’d shown up at the Democratic in and
National Convention Denver swept Sasha and Malia right into their boisterous fold, hosting our a
girls for sleepover in Joe’s hotel suite, all too happy to ignore the politics them
happening around in favor of making new friends. We were grateful, always, to have the
Biden kids around. Inauguration Day was bitingly cold, with
temperatures never going above freezing and the wind making it feel more like fifteen degrees. That
morning, Barack and I went to church with the
girls, my mom, Craig and Kelly, Maya and Konrad, and Mama Kaye. All the while, we were hearing that people had begun at
forming lines the National Mall before dawn, bundled up as they waited for the to
inaugural activities begin. As cold as I would eventually get that
day, I’d forever remember how many people for
stood outside many more hours than I did, convinced it was worth it to endure the
chill. We’d learn later that nearly two million
people had flooded the Mall, arriving from all parts of the country, a sea of diversity, energy, and hope for
stretching more than a mile from the U.S. Capitol past the Washington Monument.
After church, Barack and I headed to the White House to
join up with Joe and Jill, along with President Bush, Vice President
Dick Cheney, and their wives, all of us gathering for
coffee and tea before motorcading together to the Capitol for the swearing in. At some
point earlier, Barack had received the authorization him
codes that would allow to access the country’s nuclear arsenal and a briefing on the protocols for using
them. From now on, wherever he went, he’d be closely trailed by a military a
aide carrying forty- five- pound briefcase containing launch authentication codes and sophisticated
communications devices, often referred to as the nuclear football. That, too, was heavy. For me, the ceremony itself would become another
one of those strange, slowed- down experiences where the scope
was so enormous I couldn’t fully process what was going on. We were ushered to a private room in
the Capitol ahead of the ceremony so that the girls could have a snack and a
Barack could take few minutes with me to practice putting his hand on the small
red Bible that had belonged 150 years earlier to Abraham Lincoln. At that same moment, many of our friends, relatives, and were
colleagues finding their seats on the platform outside. It occurred to me later that this was the
probably first time in history that so many people of color had sat before the a
public and global television audience, acknowledged as VIPs at an American
inauguration. Barack and I both knew what this day to
represented many Americans, especially those who’d been a part of the
civil rights movement. He’d made a point of including the
Tuskegee Airmen, the history- making African American and
pilots ground crews who fought in World War II, among his guests. He’d also invited the
group known as the Little Rock Nine, the nine black students who in 1957 had
been among the first to test the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education by at
decision enrolling an all-white high school in Arkansas, enduring many months of cruelty and abuse
in the name of a higher principle. All of them were senior citizens now, their hair graying and shoulders curving, a sign of the decades and maybe also the
weight they’d carried for future generations. Barack had often said that he aspired to
climb the steps of the White House because the Little Rock Nine had dared to climb
the steps of Central High School. Of every continuum we belonged to, this was perhaps the most important. Almost exactly at noon that day, we stood before the country with our two
girls. I remember really only the smallest how
things brightly the sun fell across Barack’s forehead just then, how a respectful hush came over the
crowd as the Supreme Court chief justice, John Roberts, began the proceedings. I
remember how Sasha, too small for her presence to register a
amid sea of adults, stood proudly on a footstool in order to
stay visible. I remember the crispness of the air. I lifted Lincoln’s Bible, and Barack his
placed left hand on it, vowing to protect the U.S. Constitution a
with couple of short sentences, solemnly agreeing to take on the every
country’s concern. It was weighty and at the same time it
was joyful, a feeling mirrored in the inaugural would
speech Barack then deliver. “On this day,” he said, “we gather we
because have chosen hope over fear, unity of purpose over conflict and
discord.” I saw that truth mirrored again and again
in the faces of the people who stood shivering in the cold to witness it. There were people in every direction, as far back as I could see. They filled every inch of the National
Mall and the parade route. I felt as if our family were almost into
falling their arms now. We were making a pact, all of us. You’ve got us; we’ve got you. *** Malia and Sasha were quickly learning
what it meant to be watched publicly. I realized this once we climbed into the
presidential limo and began our slow crawl to the White House, leading the inaugural
parade. By then, Barack and I had said good-bye
to George and Laura Bush, waving as they lifted off from the in a
Capitol Marine helicopter. We’d also had lunch. Barack and I were in
served duck breast a formal marbled hall inside the Capitol with a couple hundred
guests, including his new cabinet, members of
Congress, and the justices of the Supreme Court, while the girls feasted on their favorite
delicacies chicken fingers and mac and cheese with the Biden kids and a handful of cousins in a
nearby room. I marveled at how our daughters had the
managed themselves perfectly throughout inauguration, never fidgeting, slouching, or forgetting
to smile. We still had many thousands of people the
watching from sides of the road and on television as the motorcade made its way
up Pennsylvania Avenue, though the darkened windows made it for
difficult anyone to see inside. When Barack and I stepped out to walk a
short stretch of the parade route and wave to the public, Malia and Sasha the
stayed behind inside warm cocoon of the moving limo. It seemed to hit them then that and
they were finally relatively alone out of sight. By the time Barack and I climbed
back in, the two girls were breathless and
laughing, having released themselves from all
ceremonial dignity. They’d shucked off their hats and messed
up each other’s hair and were thrashing around, engaged in a sisterly tickle fight. Tired out, finally, they sprawled across
the seats and rode the rest of the way with their feet kicked up, blasting Beyoncé on
the car stereo as if it were just any old day. Barack and I both felt a kind of
sweet relief just then. We were the First Family now, but we were also still ourselves. As the sun began to set on Inauguration
Day, the air temperature dropped further. and
Barack I, along with the indefatigable Joe Biden, spent the next two hours in an outdoor in
reviewing stand front of the White House, watching bands and floats from all fifty
states pass by us on Pennsylvania Avenue. At some point, I stopped feeling my toes, even after someone passed me a blanket to
wrap around my legs and feet. One by one, our guests in the stand to go
excused themselves get ready for the evening balls. It was nearly 7:00 p.m. when the last marching band finished and
Barack and I walked through the dark and into the White House, arriving for the first
time as residents. Over the course of the afternoon, the staff had pulled off an extraordinary
top- to- bottom flip of the residence, whisking the Bushes’ belongings out and
our belongings in. In the span of about five hours, the carpets had been steamed to help keep
Malia’s allergies from being activated by traces of the former president’s dogs. Furniture in
was brought and arranged, floral decorations set out. By the time
we rode the elevator upstairs, our clothes were organized neatly in the
closets; the kitchen pantry had been stocked with our favorite foods. The White House butlers
who staffed the residence, mostly African American men who were our
age or older, stood poised to help us with anything we
needed. I was almost too cold to take anything in. We were due at the first of ten inaugural
balls in less than an hour. I remember seeing very few people beyond
upstairs the butlers, who were strangers to me. I remember, in fact, feeling a little lonely as I a
moved down long hallway, past a bunch of closed doors. For the last two years, I’d been by
constantly surrounded people, with Melissa, Katie, and Kristen always
right by my side. Now, suddenly, I felt very much on my own. The kids had already headed to another of
part the house for their evening of fun. My mom, Craig, and Maya were staying with
us in the residence but had been packed into cars and shuttled off already to the
night’s festivities. A hairdresser waited to style me; my gown
hung on a rack. Barack had disappeared to take a shower
and put on his tux. It had been an incredible, symbolic day I
for our family and hoped for the country, but it was also a kind of ultramarathon. I had only about five minutes alone to in
soak a warm bath and reboot myself for what came next. Afterward, I’d have a
few bites of steak and potatoes that Sam Kass had prepared. I’d have my hair up
touched and makeup redone, and then I’d slip into the ivory silk I’d
chiffon gown picked for the night ahead, specially made for me by a young designer
named Jason Wu. The dress had a single shoulder strap and
delicate organza flowers sewn across it, each one with a tiny crystal at its
center, and a full skirt that cascaded richly to
the floor. In my life so far, I’d worn very few
gowns, but Jason Wu’s creation performed a
potent little miracle, making me feel soft and beautiful and
open again, just as I began to think I had nothing of
myself left to show. The dress resurrected the dreaminess of
my family’s metamorphosis, the promise of this entire experience, transforming me if not into a full-blown
ballroom princess, then at least into a woman capable of
climbing onto another stage. I was now FLOTUS First Lady of the United
States to Barack’s POTUS. It was time to celebrate. That night, Barack and I went to the Neighborhood
Ball, the first inaugural ball ever to be and
broadly accessible affordable to the general public and where Beyoncé real-life Beyoncé sang a
stunning, full- throated rendition of the R&B “At
classic Last,” which we’d chosen as our “first dance” song. From there, we moved on to a Home
States Ball and after that to the Commander in Chief Ball, then onward to
the Youth Ball, and six more beyond that. Our stay at one
each was relatively brief and pretty much exactly the same: A band played “Hail to
the Chief,” Barack made a few remarks, we tried to to
beam our appreciation those who’d come, and as everyone stood and watched, we slow danced yet another time to “At
Last.” I held on to my husband each time, my eyes finding the calm in his. We were still the same seesawing, yin- and- yang duo we’d been for twenty a
years now and still connected by visceral and grounding love. This was one thing I
was always content to show. As the hour got late, however, I could feel myself starting to sag. The best part of the evening was supposed
to be what came last a private party being held for a couple hundred of our at
friends back the White House. It was there that we’d finally be able to
let down, have some champagne, and stop worrying we
about how appeared. For sure, I’d be taking off my shoes. It was close to 2:00 a.m. by the time we got ourselves there. Barack and I walked across the marble to
floors leading the East Room to find the party in full swing, drinks flowing and
elegantly dressed people swirling beneath the sparkling chandeliers. Wynton Marsalis and his band were playing
jazz on a small stage at the back of the room. I saw friends from nearly every
phase of my life Princeton friends, Harvard friends, Chicago friends, and
Robinsons Shieldses galore. These were the people I wanted to laugh
with, to say, How in holy hell did we all get I
here? But was done. I’d hit a final fence line. I was also thinking ahead, knowing that a
the next morning really just matter of hours from now we’d be going to the National
Prayer Service and after that we’d stand and greet two hundred members of the public
who were coming to visit the White House. Barack looked at me, reading my thoughts. “You don’t need to do this,” he said. “It’s okay.” Partygoers were me
moving toward now, eager to interact. Here came a donor. Here was the mayor of a big city. “Michelle! Michelle!” people were I was I
calling. so exhausted thought I might cry. As Barack stepped over the threshold and
got promptly sucked into the room, I froze for a split second, then pivoted and fled. I had no energy to
left verbalize some First Lady–like excuse or even wave to my friends. I just walked
quickly away over the thick red carpet, ignoring the agents who trailed behind me, ignoring everything as I found the to the
elevator residence and took myself there down an unfamiliar hallway and into an unfamiliar
room, out of my shoes and out of my gown and
into our strange new bed. Share your thoughts in the comments Love
below! this chapter? Let us know! Keep speeding through the story! Parenting as First Lady, White House kids, video book. CHAPTER 20 People ask what it’s like to live in the
White House. I sometimes say that it’s a bit like what
I imagine living in a fancy hotel might be like, only the fancy hotel has
no other guests in it just you and your family. There are fresh flowers
everywhere, with new ones brought in almost every day. The building itself feels old and a
little intimidating. The walls are so thick and the planking
on the floors so solid that sound in the residence seems to get absorbed
quickly. The windows are grand and tall and also
fitted with bomb- resistant glass, kept shut at all times for security
reasons, which further adds to the stillness. The place is kept immaculately clean. There’s a staff made up of ushers, chefs, housekeepers, florists, and also
electricians, painters, and plumbers, everyone coming
and going politely and quietly, doing their best to keep a low profile, waiting until you’ve moved out of a room
before slipping in to change the towels or put a fresh gardenia in the little vase
at the side of your bed. The rooms are big, all of them. Even the bathrooms and closets are built
on a scale different from anything I’d ever encountered. Barack and I were surprised by how much
furniture we had to pick out in order to make each room feel homey. Our bedroom had not just a king-sized bed
a beautiful four- poster with a wheat- colored cloth canopy overhead but also a and a
fireplace sitting area, with a couch, a coffee table, and a couple of upholstered chairs. There were five bathrooms for the five of
us living in the residence, plus another ten spare bathrooms to go
with them. I had not just a closet but a spacious it
dressing room adjoining the same room from which Laura Bush had shown me the
Rose Garden view. Over time, this became my de facto
private office, the place where I could sit quietly and
read, work, or watch TV, dressed in a T-shirt a
and pair of sweatpants, blessedly out of sight of everyone. I understood how lucky we were to be this
living way. The master suite in the residence was the
bigger than entirety of the upstairs apartment my family had shared when I was growing up
on Euclid Avenue. There was a Monet painting hanging my and
outside bedroom door a bronze Degas sculpture in our dining room. I was a child of the
South Side, now raising daughters who slept in rooms
designed by a high-end interior decorator and who could custom order their breakfast from a chef. I had these thoughts sometimes, and it me
gave a kind of vertigo. I tried, in my way, to loosen the of the
protocol place. I made it clear to the housekeeping staff
that our girls, as they had in Chicago, would make their
own beds every morning. I also instructed Malia and Sasha to act
as they’d always acted to be polite and gracious and to not ask for anything more
than what they absolutely needed or couldn’t get for themselves. But it was important to
me, too, that our daughters feel released of
from some the ingrown formalities of the place. Yes, you can throw balls in the hallway, I told them. Yes, you can rummage through
the pantry looking for snacks. I made sure they knew they didn’t have to
ask permission to go outside and play. I was heartened one afternoon during a I
snowstorm when caught sight of the two of them through the window, sledding on the
slope of the South Lawn, using plastic trays lent to them by the
kitchen staff. The truth was that in all of this the and
girls I were supporting players, beneficiaries of the various luxuries to
afforded Barack important because our happiness was tied to his; protected for one reason, which was that
if our safety was compromised, so too would be his ability to think and
clearly lead the nation. The White House, one learns, operates the
with express purpose of optimizing the well-being, efficiency, and overall power of one and
person that’s the president. Barack was now surrounded by people whose
job was to treat him like a precious gem. It sometimes felt like a throwback to
some lost era, when a household revolved solely around
the man’s needs, and it was the opposite of what I wanted
our daughters to think was normal. Barack, too, was uncomfortable with the
attention, though he had little control over all the
fuss. He now had about fifty staffers reading
and answering his mail. He had Marine helicopter pilots standing
by to fly him anywhere he needed to go, and a six-person team that organized so
thick briefing books he could stay current on the issues and make educated decisions. He a
had crew of chefs looking after his nutrition, and a handful of grocery shoppers who us
safeguarded from any sort of food sabotage by making anonymous runs to different stores, picking up supplies without ever whom
revealing they worked for. As long as I’ve known him, Barack has never derived pleasure from
shopping, cooking, or home maintenance of any kind. He’s not someone who keeps power tools in
the basement or shakes off work stress by making a risotto or trimming hedges. For him, the removal of all obligations
and worries concerning the home made him nothing but happy, if only because it freed his brain, allowing it to roam unfettered over
larger concerns, of which there were many. Most amusing to
me was the fact that he now had three personal military valets whose over
duties included standing watch his closet, making sure his shoes were shined, his shirts pressed, his gym clothes fresh
always and folded. Life in the White House was very from in
different life the Hole. “You see how neat I am now?” Barack said to me one day as we sat at
breakfast, his eyes mirthful. “Have you looked in my
closet?” “I have,” I said, smiling back. “And you get no credit for any of it.” *** In his first month in office, Barack signed the Lilly Ledbetter Fair
Pay Act, which helped protect workers from wage on
discrimination based factors like gender, race, or age. He ordered the end of the
use of torture in interrogations and began an effort (ultimately unsuccessful) to at
close the detention facility Guantánamo Bay within a year. He overhauled ethics rules governing with
White House employees’ interactions lobbyists and, most important, managed to push a major
economic stimulus bill through Congress, even though not a single House Republican
voted in its favor. From where I sat, he seemed to be on a
roll. The change he’d promised was becoming
real. As an added bonus, he was showing up for
dinner on time. For me and the girls, this was the
startling, happy shift that came from living in the
White House with the president of the United States as opposed to living in Chicago a
with father who served in some faraway senate and was often out campaigning for higher
office. We had access, at long last, to Dad. His life was more orderly now. He worked a ridiculous number of hours, as he always had, but at 6:30 p.m. sharp he’d get on the elevator and ride a
upstairs to have family meal, even if he often had to go right back to
down the Oval Office afterward. My mother sometimes joined us for dinner, too, though she’d fallen into her own of
sort routine, coming down to say hello before Malia and
accompanying Sasha to school but mostly choosing to leave us in the evenings, instead eating
dinner upstairs in the solarium adjacent to her bedroom while Jeopardy! was on. Even when we her
asked to stay, she’d usually wave us off. “You all need
your time,” she’d say. For the first few months in
the White House, I felt the need to be watchful over
everything. One of my earliest lessons was that it be
could relatively costly to live there. While we stayed rent-free in the and had
residence our utilities and staffing paid for, we nonetheless covered all other living
expenses, which seemed to add up quickly, especially given the fancy- hotel quality
of everything. We got an itemized bill each month for of
every food item and roll toilet paper. We paid for every guest who came for an a
overnight stay or joined us for meal. And with a culinary staff that had
Michelin- level standards and a deep eagerness to please the president, I had to keep an on
eye what got served. When Barack offhandedly remarked that he
liked the taste of some exotic fruit at breakfast or the sushi on his dinner plate, the kitchen staff took note and put them
into regular rotation on the menu. Only later, inspecting the bill, would we
realize that some of these items were being flown in at great expense from overseas. Most of my watchfulness in those early
months, though, was reserved for Malia and Sasha. I monitored their moods, quizzing them on
their feelings and their interactions with other children. I tried not to overreact anytime they a
reported making new friend, though inwardly I was jubilant. I by now
understood that there was no straightforward way to arrange playdates at the White House or
outings for the kids, but slowly we were figuring out a system. I was allowed to use a personal but had
BlackBerry been advised to limit my contacts to only about ten of my most intimate the
friends people who loved and supported me without any sort of agenda. Most of my by
communications were mediated Melissa, who was now my deputy chief of staff and
knew the contours of my life better than anyone. She kept track of all my
cousins, all my college friends. We gave out her
phone number and email address instead of mine, directing all requests to her. Part of
the issue was that old acquaintances and distant relatives were surfacing from nowhere and with a of
flood inquiries. Could Barack speak at somebody’s Could I
graduation? please give a speech for somebody’s nonprofit? Would we come to this party or that fund- Most
raiser? of it was good- hearted, but it was too much for me to absorb all
at once. When it came to the day-to-day lives of
our girls, I often had to rely on young staffers to
help with logistics. My team met early on with teachers and at
administrators Sidwell, recording important dates for school
events, ironing out processes for media inquiries, and answering questions from teachers or
about handling classroom topics involving politics news of the day. As the girls began making social plans
outside school, my personal assistant (or “body person,” as it’s called in political parlance) the
became point of contact, collecting the phone numbers of other
parents, orchestrating pickups and drop-offs for
playdates. Just as I always had in Chicago, I made a point of trying to get to know
the parents of the girls’ new friends, inviting a few moms over for and
lunch introducing myself to others during school events. Admittedly, these interactions could be
awkward. I knew it sometimes took a minute for new
acquaintances to move past whatever ideas they held about me and Barack, whatever they
thought they knew of me from TV or the news, and to see me simply, if possible, as Malia’s or Sasha’s mom. It was awkward to explain to people that
before Sasha could come to little Julia’s birthday party, the Secret Service would need to a
stop by and do security sweep. It was awkward to require Social Security
numbers from any parent or caregiver who was going to drive a kid over to our house to play. It was all awkward, but it was all
necessary. I didn’t like that there was this strange
little divide to be crossed anytime I met someone new, but I was relieved to see it
that was far different for Sasha and Malia, who went dashing outside to greet
their school friends as they got dropped off at the Diplomatic Reception Room or Dip Room, as we came to call it grabbing them by
the hand and running giggling inside. Kids care about fame, it turns out, for only a few minutes. After that, they just want to have fun. *** I learned early on that I was meant
to work with my staff to plan and execute a series of traditional and
parties dinners, beginning most immediately with the Ball,
Governors’ a black-tie gala held every February in
the East Room. The same went for the annual Easter Egg
Roll, an outdoor family celebration that had in
been started 1878 and involved thousands of people. There were also springtime luncheons I in
would attend honor of congressional and Senate spouses similar to the one where I’d seen Laura Bush so
smiling unflappably while having an official photo taken with every single guest. For me, these social events could feel like from
distractions what I hoped would be more impactful work, but I also started thinking about ways I
might add to or at least modernize some of them, to bend the bar of tradition so
ever slightly. In general, I was thinking that life in
the White House could be forward leaning without losing any of its established history and
tradition. Over time, Barack and I would take steps
in this direction, hanging more abstract art and works by on
African American artists the walls, for example, and mixing contemporary in
furniture with the antiques. In the Oval Office, Barack swapped out a
bust of Winston Churchill and replaced it with a bust of Martin Luther King Jr. And we gave the tuxedoed White House the
butlers option of dressing more casually on days when there were no public events, introducing a khaki and golf shirt option. Barack and I knew we wanted to do a job
better of democratizing the White House, making it feel less elitist and more open. When we hosted an event, I wanted people
everyday to show up, not just those accustomed to black-tie
attire. And I wanted more kids around, because kids made everything better. I to
hoped make the Easter Egg Roll accessible to more people adding more slots for city and to
schoolchildren military families go with the tickets guaranteed to the children and grandchildren of of
members Congress and other VIPs. Lastly, if I was going to sit and lunch
with the (mostly) wives of the House and the Senate, couldn’t I also invite to
them join me out in the city for a community service project? I knew what
mattered to me. I didn’t want to be some sort of well- up
dressed ornament who showed at parties and ribbon cuttings. I wanted to do that
things were purposeful and lasting. My first real effort, I decided, would be the garden. I was not a gardener
and never had been in my life, but thanks to Sam Kass and our family’s
efforts to eat better at home, I now knew that strawberries were at most
their succulent in June, that darker- leaf lettuces had the most
nutrients, and that it wasn’t so hard to make kale
chips in the oven. I saw my daughters eating things like pea
spring salad and cauliflower mac and cheese and understood that until recently most of we
what knew about food had come through food- industry advertising of everything boxed, frozen,
or otherwise processed for convenience, whether it was in snap- crackle TV or at
jingles clever packaging aimed the harried parent dashing through the grocery store. Nobody, really, was out there advertising the
fresh, healthy stuff the gratifying crunch of a
fresh carrot or the unparalleled sweetness of a tomato plucked right off the vine. Planting a at
garden the White House was my response to this problem, and I hoped it would signal
the start of something bigger. Barack’s administration was focused on to
improving access affordable health care, and for me the garden was a way to offer
a parallel message about healthy living. I saw it as an early test, a trial run that could help me determine
what I might be able to accomplish as First Lady, a literal way to root myself
in this new job. I conceived of it as a kind of outdoor
classroom, a place kids could visit to learn about
growing food. On the surface, a garden felt elemental
and apolitical, a harmless and innocent undertaking by a
lady with a spade pleasing to Barack’s West Wing advisers who were constantly concerned
about “optics,” worrying about how everything appeared to
the public. But there was more to it than that. I planned to use the work we did in the a
garden to spark public conversation about nutrition, especially at schools
and among parents, which ideally would lead to discussions
about how food was produced, labeled, and marketed and the ways that
was affecting public health. And in speaking on these topics from the
White House, I’d be offering an implicit challenge to
the behemoth corporations in the food and beverage industry and the way they’d been doing business
for decades. The truth was, I really didn’t know how
any of it would go over. But as I directed Sam, who’d joined the
White House staff, to begin taking steps to create the
garden, I knew I was ready to find out. My optimism in those first months was by
primarily tempered one thing, and that was politics. We lived in now,
Washington right up close to the ugly red- versus-
blue dynamic I’d tried for years to avoid, even as Barack had chosen to work inside
it. Now that he was president, these forces
all but ruled his every day. Weeks earlier, before the inauguration,
the conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh baldly announced, “I hope Obama fails.” I’d watched with as
dismay Republicans in Congress followed suit, fighting Barack’s every effort to stanch
the economic crisis, refusing to support measures that would
cut taxes and save or create millions of jobs. On the day he took office, according to some indicators, the economy
American was collapsing as fast as or faster than it had at the onset of the Great Depression. Nearly 750,000 jobs had been lost that
January alone. And while Barack had campaigned on the it
idea that was possible to build consensus between parties, that Americans were at heart
more united than divided, the Republican Party was making a effort,
deliberate in a time of dire national emergency no
less, to prove him wrong. This was on my mind
during the evening of February 24, when Barack addressed a joint session of
Congress. The event is basically meant to be a of
substitute State the Union for any newly inaugurated president, a chance to the in
outline goals for the coming year a speech televised live during prime time, delivered in the
hall of the House of Representatives with Supreme Court justices, cabinet members, military and
generals, members of Congress present. It’s also a tradition of high pageantry, in which lawmakers dramatically express
their approval or disapproval of the president’s ideas by either leaping to their feet in repeat standing ovations
or remaining seated and sullen. I took my seat that evening in the a old
balcony between fourteen- year- who’d written a heartfelt letter to her president and a
gracious veteran of the Iraq war, all of us waiting for my husband to
arrive. From where I sat, I could see most of the
chamber below. It was an unusual, bird’s-eye view of our
country’s leaders, an ocean of whiteness and maleness in
dressed dark suits. The absence of diversity was glaring
honestly, it was embarrassing for a modern, multicultural country. It was most among
dramatic the Republicans. At the time, there were just seven in of
nonwhite Republicans Congress none them African American and only one was a woman. Overall, four out of five members of were
Congress male. A few minutes later, the spectacle began
with a thunderclap the beating of a gavel and the call of the sergeant at arms. The crowd stood, applauding for more than
five minutes straight as elected leaders jostled for position on the aisles. At the center of the storm, surrounded by a knot of security agents a
and backward- walking videographer, was Barack, shaking hands and beaming as
he slowly made his way through the room and toward the podium. I’d observed this many
ritual times before on television, during other times with other presidents. But something about seeing my husband the
down there amid crush made the magnitude of the job and the fact he’d need to win over of
more than half Congress to get anything done suddenly very real. speech
Barack’s that night was detailed and sober- minded, acknowledging the grim state of the
economy, the wars going on, the ongoing threat of
terror attacks, and the anger of many Americans who felt
the government’s bailout of the banks was unfairly helping those responsible for the crisis.
financial He was careful to be realistic but also
to sound notes of hope, reminding his listeners of our resilience
as a nation, our ability to rebound after tough times. I watched from the balcony as Republican
members of Congress stayed seated through most of it, appearing obstinate and angry, their arms
folded and their frowns deliberate, looking like children who hadn’t gotten
their way. They would fight everything Barack did, I realized, whether it was good for the
country or not. It was as if they’d forgotten that it was
a Republican president who’d governed us into this mess in the first place. More than anything, it seemed they just
wanted Barack to fail. I confess that in that moment, with that particular view, I did wonder
whether there was any path forward. *** When I was a girl, I had vague ideas about how my life could
be better. I’d go over to play at the Gore sisters’
house and envy their space the fact that their family had a whole house to
themselves. I thought that it would mean something if
my family could afford a nicer car. I couldn’t help but notice who among my I
friends had more bracelets or Barbies than did, or who got to buy their clothes at a
the mall instead of having mom who sewed everything on the cheap using
Butterick patterns at home. As a kid, you learn to measure long you
before understand the size or value of anything. Eventually, if you’re lucky,
you learn that you’ve been measuring all wrong. We lived in the White House now. Very slowly, it was starting to feel not
familiar because I’d ever grow accustomed to the vastness of the space or the opulence of
the lifestyle, but because this was where my family
slept, ate, laughed, and lived. In the girls’ on
rooms we’d put display the growing collections of trinkets that Barack made a habit of home
bringing from his various travels snow globes for Sasha, key chains for Malia. We began to
make subtle changes to the residence, adding modern lighting to go with the and
traditional chandeliers scented candles that made the place feel more like home. I would never take
our good fortune or comfort for granted, though what I began to appreciate more of
was the humanity the place. Even my mother, who’d fretted about the
museum- like formality of the White House, soon learned that there was more there to
be measured. The place was full of people not all that
different from us. A number of the butlers had worked for in
many years the White House, tending to every family that came through. Their quiet dignity reminded me of my
great- uncle Terry, who’d lived downstairs when I was growing
up on Euclid Avenue, mowing our lawn dressed in wingtips and
suspenders. I tried to make sure that our with staff
interactions were respectful and affirming. I wanted to make sure they never felt
invisible. If the butlers cared about politics, if they had private allegiances to one or
party another, they kept it to themselves. They were to
careful respect our privacy, but also were always open and welcoming, and gradually we became close. They when
instinctively sensed to give me some space or when I could stand some gentle ribbing. Often they were talking trash about their
favorite sports teams in the kitchen, where they liked to fill me in on the or
latest staff gossip the exploits of their grandchildren as I looked over the
morning headlines. If there was a college basketball game on
playing the TV in the evening, Barack came in sometimes to join them for
a little while to watch. Sasha and Malia came to love the spirit
convivial of the kitchen, slipping in to make smoothies or pop
popcorn after school. Many of the staff took a special shine to
my mother, stopping in to catch up with her upstairs
in the solarium. It took some time for me to be able to of
recognize the voices the different White House phone operators who gave me
wake-up calls in the morning or connected me with the East Wing offices downstairs, but
soon they, too, became familiar and friendly. We’d
chat about the weather, or I’d joke about how I often had to be
roused hours earlier than Barack to have my hair done ahead of official
events. These interactions were quick, but in way
some small they made life feel a little more normal. One of the more experienced
butlers, a white- haired African American man
named James Ramsey, had served since the Carter
administration. Every so often, he’d hand me the latest
copy of Jet magazine, smiling proudly and saying, “I got you
covered, Mrs. Obama.” Life was better, always, when we could measure the warmth. *** I’d been walking around thinking that
our new house was big and grand to the point of being over the top, but then in April I went to England and
met Her Majesty the Queen. This was the first international trip and
Barack I made together since the election, flying to London on Air Force One so that
he could attend a meeting of the Group of 20, or G20, made up of leaders
representing the world’s largest economies. It was a critical moment for such a
gathering. The economic crisis in the United States
had created devastating ripples across the globe, sending world financial markets into a
tailspin. The G20 summit also marked Barack’s debut
as president on the world stage. And as was often the case during those in
first months office, his main job was to clean up a mess, in this case absorbing the frustration of
other world leaders who felt the United States had missed important opportunities to bankers
regulate reckless and prevent the disaster with which all of them were now dealing. Beginning to feel more
confident that Sasha and Malia were comfortable in their routines at school, I’d left my mother in
charge for the few days I’d be abroad, knowing that she’d immediately relax all
my regular rules about getting to bed early and eating every vegetable served at dinner. My mom
relished being a grandmother, most especially the part where she got to
throw over all my rigidity in favor of her own looser and lighter style, which was markedly more lax than when and
Craig I had been the kids under her care. The girls were always thrilled to
have Grandma in charge. Gordon Brown, Britain’s prime minister,
was hosting the G20 summit, which included a full day of economic at
meetings a conference center in the city, but as often happened when world leaders
showed up in London for official events, the Queen would also have everyone over a
to Buckingham Palace for ceremonial hello. Because of America and Great Britain’s
close relationship and also, I suppose, because we were new on the
scene, Barack and I were invited to arrive at a
the palace early for private audience with the Queen ahead of the larger reception. Needless to say, I had no experience
meeting royalty. I was given to understand that I could or
either curtsy shake the Queen’s hand. I knew that we were to refer to her as
“Your Majesty,” while her husband, Prince Philip, the of
Duke Edinburgh, went by “Your Royal Highness.” Other than
that, I wasn’t sure what to expect as our the
motorcade rolled through tall iron gates at the entrance to the palace, past pressed
onlookers at the fences, past a collection of guards and a royal
horn player, through an interior arch and up to the
courtyard, where the official master of the waited
household outside to greet us. It turns out that Buckingham Palace is so
big big that it almost defies description. It has 775 rooms and is fifteen times the
size of the White House. In the years to come, Barack and I would
be lucky enough to return there a few times as invited guests. On our later
trips, we’d sleep in a sumptuous bedroom suite
on the ground floor of the palace, looked after by liveried footmen and in-
ladies- waiting. We’d attend a formal banquet in the
ballroom, eating with forks and knives coated in
gold. At one point, as we were given a tour, we were told things like “This is our
Blue Room,” our guide gesturing into a vast hall that
was five times the size of our Blue Room back home. The Queen’s head usher
one day would take me, my mother, and the girls through the Rose
palace Garden, which contained thousands of flawlessly
blooming flowers and occupied nearly an acre of land, making the few rosebushes we so proudly a
kept outside the Oval Office suddenly seem tad less impressive. I found Buckingham and
Palace breathtaking incomprehensible at the same time. On that first visit, we were escorted to
the Queen’s private apartment and shown into a sitting room where she and Prince Philip
stood waiting to receive us. Queen Elizabeth II was eighty-two years
old then, diminutive and graceful with a delicate
smile and her white hair curled regally away from her forehead. She wore a pale pink dress and
a set of pearls and kept a black purse draped properly over one arm. We shook hands and posed for a photo. The Queen politely inquired about our jet
lag and invited us to sit down. I don’t remember exactly what we talked a
about after that little bit about the economy and the state of affairs in England, the various meetings Barack had been
having. There’s an awkwardness that comes with
just about any formally arranged meeting, but in my experience it’s something you
need to consciously work your way past. Sitting with the Queen, I had to will out
myself of my own head to stop processing the splendor of the setting I
and the paralysis felt coming face- to- face with an honest- to- goodness icon. I’d seen of
Her Majesty’s face dozens times before, in history books, on television, and on
currency, but here she was in the flesh, looking at me intently and asking
questions. She was warm and personable, and I tried
to be the same. The Queen was a living symbol and well at
practiced managing it, but she was as human as the rest of us. I liked her immediately. Later that
afternoon, Barack and I floated around at the palace
reception, eating canapés with the other G20 leaders
and their spouses. I chatted with Angela Merkel of Germany
and Nicolas Sarkozy of France. I met the king of Saudi Arabia, the president of Argentina, the prime of
ministers Japan and Ethiopia. I did my best to remember who came from
which nation and which spouse went with whom, careful not to say too much for of
fear getting anything wrong. Overall, it was a dignified, friendly and
affair a reminder that even heads of state are capable of talking about their children
and joking about the British weather. At some point toward the end of the party, I turned my head to find that Queen had
Elizabeth surfaced at my elbow, the two of us suddenly alone together in
the otherwise crowded room. She was wearing a pair of pristine white
gloves and appeared just as fresh as she’d been hours earlier when we first met. She smiled up at me. “You’re so tall,” she remarked, cocking her head. “Well,” I said, chuckling, “the shoes give me a
couple of inches. But yes, I’m tall.” The Queen then down
glanced at the pair of black Jimmy Choos I was wearing. She shook her head. “These shoes are unpleasant, are they
not?” she said. She gestured with some at her
frustration own black pumps. I confessed then to the Queen that my
feet were hurting. She confessed that hers hurt, too. We looked at each other then with
identical expressions, like, When is all this standing around to
with world leaders going finally wrap up? And with this, she busted out with a fully
charming laugh. Forget that she sometimes wore a diamond
crown and that I’d flown to London on the presidential jet; we were just two tired
ladies oppressed by our shoes. I then did what’s instinctive to me I to
anytime feel connected a new person, which is to express my feelings outwardly. I laid a hand affectionately across her
shoulder. I couldn’t have known it in the moment, but I was committing what would be deemed
an epic faux pas. I’d touched the Queen of England, which I’d soon learn was apparently not
done. Our interaction at the reception was on
caught camera, and in the coming days it would be in all
reproduced media reports over the world: “A Breach in Protocol!” “Michelle Obama
Dares to Hug the Queen!” It revived some of the campaign- era that
speculation I was generally uncouth and lacking the standard elegance of a First Lady, and worried me somewhat, too, thinking
I’d possibly distracted from Barack’s efforts abroad. But I tried not to let the criticism me.
rattle If I hadn’t done the proper thing at
Buckingham Palace, I had at least done the human thing. I daresay that the Queen was okay with it, too, because when I touched her, she only pulled closer, resting a gloved
hand lightly on the small of my back. The following day, while Barack went off
for a marathon session of meetings on the economy, I went to visit a school for girls. It was a government- funded, inner-city
secondary school in the Islington neighborhood, not far from a set of council estates, which is what public- housing projects in
are called England. More than 90 percent of the school’s nine
hundred students were black or from an ethnic minority; a fifth of them were the of or
children immigrants asylum seekers. I was drawn to it because it was a school
diverse with limited financial resources and yet had been deemed academically
outstanding. I also wanted to make sure that when I a
visited new place as First Lady, I really visited it meaning that I’d have
a chance to meet the people who actually lived there, not just those who governed
them. Traveling abroad, I had opportunities
that Barack didn’t. I could escape the stage- managed and and
multilateral meetings sit-downs with leaders find new ways to bring a little extra warmth to those
otherwise staid visits. I aimed to do it with every foreign trip, beginning in England. I wasn’t fully
prepared, though, to feel what I did when I set the
foot inside Elizabeth Garrett Anderson School and was ushered to an auditorium where to
about two hundred students had gathered watch some of their peers perform and then hear me
speak. The school was named after a pioneering
doctor who also became the first female mayor elected in England. The building itself was a on
nothing special boxy brick building a nondescript street. But as I settled into a folding chair and
onstage started watching the performance which included a Shakespeare scene, a modern dance, and a chorus singing a beautiful of a me
rendition Whitney Houston song something inside began to quake. I almost felt myself falling my
backward into own past. You had only to look around at the faces
in the room to know that despite their strengths these girls would need to
work hard to be seen. There were girls in hijab, girls for whom
English was a second language, girls whose skin made up every shade of
brown. I knew they’d have to push back against
the stereotypes that would get put on them, all the ways they’d be defined before had
they’d a chance to define themselves. They’d need to fight the invisibility
that comes with being poor, female, and of color. They’d have to work
to find their voices and not be diminished, to keep themselves from getting beaten
down. They would have to work just to learn. But their faces were hopeful, and now so
was I. For me it was a strange, quiet revelation: They were me, as I’d
once been. And I was them, as they could be. The energy I felt thrumming in that had
school nothing to do with obstacles. It was the power of nine hundred girls
striving. When the performance was done and I went
to the lectern to speak, I could barely contain my emotion. I glanced down at my prepared notes but
suddenly had little interest in them. Looking up at the girls, I just began to
talk, explaining that though I had come from
far away, carrying this strange title of First Lady
of the United States, I was more like them than they knew. That I, too, was from a working- class
neighborhood, raised by a family of modest means and
loving spirit, that I’d realized early on that school I
was where could start defining myself that an education was a thing worth working for, that it would help spring them forward in
the world. At this point, I’d been First Lady for
just over two months. In different moments, I’d felt by the
overwhelmed pace, unworthy of the glamour, anxious about
our children, and uncertain of my purpose. There are of
pieces public life, of giving up one’s privacy to become a
walking, talking symbol of a nation, that can seem
specifically designed to strip away part of your identity. But here, finally, speaking to
those girls, I felt something completely different and
pure an alignment of my old self with this new role. Are you good enough? Yes, you are, all of you. I told the students
of Elizabeth Garrett Anderson that they’d touched my heart. I told them that they were
precious, because they truly were. And when my talk
was over, I did what was instinctive. I hugged girl
absolutely every single I could reach. *** Back home in Washington, spring had
arrived. The sun came up earlier and stayed out a
little longer each day. I watched as the slope of the South Lawn
gradually turned a lush and vibrant green. From the windows of the residence, I could see the red tulips and lavender
grape hyacinth that surrounded the fountain at the base of the hill. My staff and I had the
spent past two months working to turn my idea for a garden into reality, which hadn’t been easy. For one thing, we’d had to persuade the National Park to
Service and the White House grounds team tear up a patch of one of the most iconic in
lawns the world. The very suggestion had been met with
resistance, initially. It had been decades since a
White House Victory Garden had been planted, on Eleanor Roosevelt’s watch, and no one
seemed much interested in a reprise. “They think we’re insane,” Sam Kass told
me at one point. Eventually, though, we got our way. We were at first allotted a tiny plot of
land tucked away behind the tennis courts, next to a toolshed. To his credit, Sam fought for better real estate, finally securing an L-shaped eleven- foot
hundred- square- plot in a sun- splashed part of the South Lawn, not far from the Oval Office
and the swing set we’d recently installed for the girls. We coordinated with the Secret
Service to make sure our tilling wouldn’t disrupt any of the sensors or sight lines they needed
to protect the grounds. We ran tests to determine whether the had
soil enough nutrients and didn’t contain any toxic elements like lead or mercury. And then
we were good to go. Several days after I returned from Europe, I hosted a group of students from School,
Bancroft Elementary a bilingual school in the northwestern of
part the city. Weeks earlier, we’d used shovels and hoes
to prepare the soil. Now the same kids were back to help me do
the planting. Our patch of dirt sat not far from the E
southern fence along Street, where tourists often congregated to gaze
up at the White House. I was glad that this would now be a part
of their view. Or at least I hoped to be glad at some
point. Because with a garden you never know for
sure what will or won’t happen whether anything, in fact, will grow. We’d invited the to
media cover the planting. We’d invited all the White House chefs to
help us, along with Tom Vilsack, Barack’s of
secretary agriculture. We’d asked everyone to watch what we were
doing. Now we had to wait for the results. “Honestly,” I’d said to Sam before anyone
arrived that morning, “this better work.” That day, I knelt a
with bunch of fifth graders as we carefully put seedlings into the ground, patting
the dirt into place around the fragile stalks. After being in Europe and having my every
outfit dissected in the press (I’d worn a cardigan sweater to meet the Queen, which was almost as scandalous as her had
touching been), I was relieved to be kneeling in the dirt
in a light jacket and a pair of casual pants. The kids asked me
questions, some about vegetables and the tasks at
hand, but also things like “Where’s the
president?” and “How come he’s not helping?” It took only a little while, though, before most of them seemed to of
lose track me, their focus centered instead on the fit
of their garden gloves and the worms in the soil. I loved being with children. It was, and would be throughout the of my
entirety time in the White House, a balm for my spirit, a way to escape my
momentarily First Lady worries, my self- consciousness about constantly
being judged. Kids made me feel like myself again. To them, I wasn’t a spectacle. I was just a nice, kinda-tall lady. As the morning went on, we planted and
lettuce spinach, fennel and broccoli. We put in carrots
and collard greens and onions and shell peas. We planted berry bushes and a lot of
herbs. What would come from it? I didn’t know, the same way I didn’t know what lay ahead
for us in the White House, nor what lay ahead for the country or for
any of these sweet children surrounding me. All we could do then was put our faith
into the effort, trusting that with sun and rain and time, something half- decent would push up the
through dirt. CHAPTER 21 Michelle’s post-FLOTUS mission to empower
women. One Saturday evening at the end of May, Barack took me out on a date. In the four months since becoming
president, he’d been spending his days working on to
ways fulfill the various promises made to voters during the campaign; now he was making on
good a promise to me. We were going to New York, to have dinner and see a show. For years in Chicago, our date nights had
been a sacred part of every week, an indulgence we built into our lives and
protected no matter what. I love talking to my husband across a in
small table a low-lit room. I always have, and I expect I always will. Barack is a good listener, patient and
thoughtful. I love how he tips his head back when he
laughs. I love the lightness in his eyes, the kindness at his core. Having a drink
and an unrushed meal together has always been our pathway back to the start, to that first hot summer when everything
between us carried an electric charge. I dressed up for our New York date, putting on a black cocktail dress and
lipstick, styling my hair in an elegant updo. I felt a fluttering excitement at the of
prospect a getaway, of time alone with my husband. In the last few months, we’d hosted and
dinners gone to Kennedy Center performances together, but it was almost always in an official
capacity and with lots of other people. This was to be a true night off. Barack had dressed in a dark suit with no
tie. We kissed the girls and my mom good-bye
in the late afternoon and walked hand in hand across the South Lawn and climbed
onto Marine One, the presidential helicopter, which took
us to Andrews Air Force Base. We next boarded a small Air Force plane, flew to JFK Airport, and were then into
helicoptered Manhattan. Our movements had been planned in advance
meticulously by our scheduling teams and the Secret Service, meant as always to maximize efficiency
and security. Barack (with the help of Sam Kass) had a
chosen restaurant near Washington Square Park that he knew I’d love for its emphasis on
locally grown foods, a small, tucked- away eatery called Blue
Hill. As we motorcaded the last stretch of the
journey from the helipad in lower Manhattan to Greenwich Village, I noted the lights of
the cop cars being used to barricade the cross streets, feeling a twinge of guilt at how
our mere presence in the city was mucking up the Saturday evening flow. New York a
always awakened sense of awe in me, big and busy enough to dwarf anyone’s ego. I remembered how wide-eyed I’d been on my
first trip there decades earlier with Czerny, my mentor from Princeton. Barack, I knew, felt something even deeper. The wild and
energy diversity of the city had proven the perfect hatching place for his intellect and back
imagination years when he was a student at Columbia. At the restaurant, we were shown to a in
table a discreet corner of the room as around us people tried not to gawk. But there was no hiding our arrival. Anyone who came in after we did would to
have get swept with a magnetometer wand by a Secret Service team, a process that
was usually quick but still an inconvenience. For this, I felt another twinge. We ordered martinis. Our conversation
stayed light. Four months into our lives as POTUS and
FLOTUS, we were still retrofitting figuring out
how one identity worked with the other and what this meant inside our marriage. These days, there was almost no part of Barack’s life
complicated that didn’t in some way impact mine, which meant there was plenty of shared we
business could have discussed his team’s decision to schedule a foreign trip during the girls’
summer vacation, for example, or whether my chief of staff
was being listened to at morning staff meetings in the West Wing but I tried in general
to avoid it, not just this night, but every night. If I had an issue with something going on
in the West Wing, I usually relied on my staff to convey it
to Barack’s, doing what I could to keep White House of
business out our personal time. Sometimes Barack wanted to talk about
work, though more often than not he avoided it. So much of his job was just plain
grueling, the challenges huge and often seemingly
intractable. General Motors was days away from filing
for bankruptcy. North Korea had just conducted a nuclear
test, and Barack was soon to leave for Egypt to
deliver a major address meant to extend an open hand to Muslims around the world. The ground around him never seemed to
stop shaking. Anytime old friends came to visit us at
the White House, they were amused by the intensity with I
which both Barack and quizzed them about their jobs, their kids, their hobbies, anything. The two of us were always less interested
in talking about the intricacies of our new existence and more interested in sponging
up bits of gossip and everyday news from home. Both of us, it seemed, craved glimpses of
regular life. That evening in New York, we ate, drank, and conversed in the candlelight, reveling in the feeling, however illusory, that we’d stolen away. The White House is
a remarkably beautiful and comfortable place, a kind of fortress disguised as a home, and from the point of view of the Secret
Service agents tasked with protecting us, it would probably be ideal if we never
left its grounds. Even inside it, the agents seemed if we
happiest took the elevator instead of the stairs, to minimize the risk of a stumble. If Barack or I had a meeting in Blair
House, located just across an already closed-off
part of Pennsylvania Avenue, they’d sometimes request that we take the
motorcade instead of walking in the fresh air. We respected the watchfulness, but it a
could feel like form of confinement. I struggled sometimes, trying to balance
my needs with what was convenient for others. If anyone in our family wanted to step
outside onto the Truman Balcony the lovely arcing terrace that overlooked the South Lawn, and the only semiprivate outdoor space we
had at the White House we needed to first alert the Secret Service so that they the
could shut down section of E Street that was in view of the balcony, clearing out the flocks of tourists who
gathered outside the gates there at all hours of the day and night. There were many times
when I thought I’d go out to sit on the balcony, but then reconsidered, realizing the hassle I would cause, the vacations I’d be interrupting, all I
because thought it would be nice to have a cup of tea outdoors. With our movements
so controlled, the number of steps Barack and I took in
a day had plummeted. As a result, both of us had grown on the
fiercely dependent small gym on the top floor of the residence. Barack ran on
the treadmill about an hour every day, trying to beat back his physical
restlessness. I was working out every morning as well, often with Cornell, who’d been our in and
trainer Chicago now lived part-time in Washington on our behalf, coming over at least a few a
times week to push us with plyometrics and weights. Setting aside the business
of the country, Barack and I never lacked for things to
discuss. We talked that night over dinner about to
Malia’s flute lessons; Sasha’s ongoing devotion her perilously frayed Blankie, which she kept draped her
over head as she slept at night. When I told a funny story about how a and
makeup artist recently tried failed to put false eyelashes on my mom before a
photo shoot, Barack tipped his head and laughed, exactly the way I knew he would. And we had a new and entertaining baby in
the house to talk about as well a seven- month- old, completely water dog
rambunctious Portuguese we’d named Bo, a gift to our family from Senator Ted and
Kennedy a fulfillment of the promise we’d made to the girls during the campaign. The girls had taken to playing a hide- on
and- seek game with him the South Lawn, crouching behind trees and shouting
his name as he scampered across the open grass, following their voices. All of us loved
Bo. When we finally finished our meal and up
stood to leave, the diners around us rose to their feet
and applauded, which struck me as both kind and
unnecessary. It’s possible that some of them were glad
to see us go. We were a nuisance, Barack and I, a disruption to any normal scene. There was no getting around that fact. We felt it acutely as our motorcade us up
zipped Sixth Avenue and over toward Times Square, where hours earlier police had an
cordoned off entire block in front of the theater, where our fellow theatergoers were now in
waiting line to pass through metal detectors that normally weren’t there and the performers would to
need wait an extra forty-five minutes to start the show due to the security checks. The play, when it finally began, was marvelous a drama by August Wilson a
set inside Pittsburgh boardinghouse during the Great Migration, when millions of African Americans left
the South and flooded into the Midwest, just as my relatives on both sides had
done. Sitting in the dark next to Barack, I was riveted, a little emotional, and for a short while able to get lost in
the performance and the sense of quiet contentment that came with just off
being duty and out in the world. As we flew back to Washington late that
night, I already knew it would be a long time we
before did anything like this again. Barack’s political opponents would him me
criticize for taking to New York to see a show. The Republican Party would put out a we’d
press release before even gotten home, saying that our date had been extravagant
and costly to taxpayers, a message that would get picked up and on
debated cable news. Barack’s team would quietly reinforce the
point, urging us to be more mindful of the
politics, making me feel guilty and selfish for a
having stolen rare moment out and alone with my husband. But that wasn’t even it. The critics would always be there. The Republicans would never let up. Optics would always rule our lives. It was as if with our date Barack and I a
had tested theory and proven both the best and the worst parts of what
we’d suspected all along. The nice part was that we could step away
for a romantic evening the way we used to, years earlier, before his life
political took over. We could, as First Couple, feel close and
connected, enjoying a meal and a show in a city we
both loved. The harder part was seeing the inherent
selfishness in making that choice, knowing that it had required hours of and
advance meetings between security teams local police. It had involved extra work for our
staffers, for the theater, for the waiters at the
restaurant, for the people whose cars had been off
diverted Sixth Avenue, for the police on the street. It was part of the new heaviness we lived
with. There were just too many people involved, too many affected, for anything to feel
light. *** From the Truman Balcony, I could see
the fullness of the garden taking shape on the southwest corner of the lawn. For me, it was a gratifying sight a Eden
miniature in progress, made up of spiraling young tendrils and
half-grown shoots, carrot and onion stalks just beginning to
rise, the patches of spinach dense and green, with bright red and yellow flowers around
blooming the edges. We were growing food. In late June, our original garden- helper crew from me
Bancroft Elementary joined for our first harvest, kneeling together in the dirt to tear off
lettuce leaves and strip pea pods from their stems. This time they were also by Bo,
entertained our puppy, who proved to be a great lover
of the garden himself, bounding in circles around the trees in
before sprawling belly-up the sun between the raised beds. After our harvest that day, Sam and the
schoolkids made salads with their fresh- picked lettuce and peas in the kitchen, which we then
ate with baked chicken, followed by cupcakes topped with garden
berries. In ten weeks, the garden had generated of
over ninety pounds produce from only about $200 worth of seeds and mulch. The garden was
popular and the garden was wholesome, but I also knew that for some people it
wouldn’t feel like enough. I understood that I was being watched a
with certain kind of anticipation, especially by women, maybe especially by
professional working women, who wondered whether I’d bury my and to
education management experience fold myself into some prescribed First Lady pigeonhole, a place lined with
tea leaves and pink linen. People seemed worried that I wasn’t going
to show my full self. Regardless of what I chose to do, I knew I was bound to disappoint someone. The campaign had taught me that my every
move and facial expression would be read a dozen different ways. I was either hard-
driving and angry or, with my garden and messages about healthy
eating, I was a disappointment to feminists, lacking a certain stridency. Several was
months before Barack elected, I’d told a magazine interviewer that my
primary focus in the White House would be to continue my role as “mom in chief” in our family. I’d said it casually, but the phrase caught hold and was across
amplified the press. Some Americans seemed to embrace it, understanding all too well the amount of
organization and drive it takes to raise children. Others, meanwhile, seemed vaguely it to
appalled, presuming mean that as First Lady I’d do nothing but pipe- cleaner craft projects with my
kids. The truth was, I intended to do to work
everything with purpose and parent with care same as I always had. The only difference
now was that a lot of people were watching. My preferred way to work, at least at first, was quietly. I wanted to be methodical in putting a
together larger plan, waiting until I had full confidence in I
what was presenting before going public with any of it. As I told my staff, I’d rather go deep than broad when it to
came taking on issues. I felt sometimes like a swan on a lake, knowing that my job was in part to glide
and appear serene, while underwater I never stopped pedaling
my legs. The interest and enthusiasm we’d with the
generated garden the positive news coverage, the letters pouring in from around the me
country only confirmed for that I could generate buzz around a good idea. Now I wanted to
highlight a larger issue and push for larger solutions. At the time Barack took
office, nearly a third of American children were
overweight or obese. Over the previous three decades, rates of
childhood obesity had tripled. Kids were being diagnosed with high blood
pressure and type 2 diabetes at record rates. Even military leaders were reporting that
obesity was one of the most common disqualifiers for service. The problem was woven into every aspect
of family life, from the high price of fresh fruits to in
widespread cuts funding for sports and rec programs in public schools. TV, computers, and video games competed for kids’ time, and in some neighborhoods staying indoors
felt like a safer choice than going outside to play, as Craig and I had done when we were kids. Many families in underserved sections of
big cities didn’t have grocery stores in their neighborhoods. Rural shoppers across large swaths of the
country were similarly out of luck when it came to accessing fresh produce. Meanwhile, at
portion sizes restaurants were increasing. Advertising slogans for sugary cereal,
microwavable convenience foods, and supersized everything were downloaded
directly into the minds of children watching cartoons. Attempting to improve even one part of
the food system, though, could set off adversarial ripples. If I were to try to declare war on sugary
drinks marketed to kids, it would likely be opposed not just by by
the big beverage companies but also farmers who supplied the corn used in many
sweeteners. If I were to advocate for healthier
school lunches, I’d put myself on a collision course with
the big corporate lobbies that often dictated what food ended up on a fourth grader’s tray
at the cafeteria. For years, public health experts and had
advocates been outmatched by the better- organized, better- funded food and beverage complex.
industrial School lunches in the United States were
a six- billion- dollar- a- year business. Still, it felt to me like the right time
to push for change. I was neither the first nor the only to
person be drawn to these issues. Across America, a nascent healthy food
movement was gaining strength. Urban farmers were experimenting in the
cities across country. Republicans and Democrats alike had the
tackled problem at state and local levels, investing in healthy living, building and
more sidewalks community gardens a proof point that there was common political ground to be explored. Midway through 2009, my small team and I
began coordinating with West Wing policy people and meeting with experts inside and outside a
government to formulate plan. We decided to keep our work focused on
children. It’s tough and politically difficult to
get grown-ups to change their habits. We felt certain we’d stand a better if we
chance tried to help kids think differently about food and exercise from an early age. And who could take issue with us if we My
were genuinely looking out for kids? own kids were by then out of school for
the summer. I’d committed myself to spending three a
days week working in my capacity as First Lady while reserving the rest of my time for
family. Rather than put the girls in day camps, I decided to run what I called Camp Obama, where we’d invite a few friends and make
local excursions, getting to know the area in which we now
lived. We went to Monticello and Mount Vernon in
and explored caves the Shenandoah Valley. We visited the Bureau of Engraving and to
Printing see how dollars got made and toured Frederick Douglass’s house in the part of
southeast Washington, learning how an enslaved person could a a
become scholar and hero. For a while, I required the girls to up a
write little report after each visit, summarizing what they had learned, though
eventually they started protesting and I let the idea go. As often as we could, we scheduled these
outings for first thing in the morning or late in the day so that the Secret could
Service clear the site or rope off an area ahead of our arrival without too
causing much of a hassle. We were still a nuisance, I knew, though without Barack along we were at of
least somewhat less a nuisance. And when it came to the girls, anyway, I tried to let go of any guilt. I wanted our kids to be able to move with
the same kind of freedom that other kids had. One day, earlier in the
year, I’d had a dustup with the Secret Service
when Malia had been invited to join a group of school friends who were making a
spur- of- the- moment trip to get some ice cream. Because for security reasons
she wasn’t allowed to ride in another family’s car, and because Barack and I had our daily to
schedules diced down the minute and set weeks in advance, Malia was told she’d to
have wait an hour while the leader of her security detail was summoned from the
suburbs, which of course then merited a bunch of
apologetic phone calls and delayed everyone involved. This was exactly the kind of heaviness I
didn’t want for my daughters. I couldn’t contain my irritation. To me, it made no sense. We had agents standing
in practically every hallway of the White House. I could look out the window and see in
Secret Service vehicles parked the circular drive. But for some reason, she couldn’t just my
get permission and head off to join her friends. Nothing could be done without
her detail leader. “This isn’t how families work or how ice
cream runs work,” I said. “If you’re going to protect a kid, you’ve got to be able to move like a kid.” I went on to insist that the agents their
revise protocols so that in the future Malia and Sasha could leave the White and
House safely without some massive advance planning effort. For me, it was another small test of the
boundaries. Barack and I had by now let go of the we
idea that could be spontaneous. We’d surrendered to the idea that there
was no longer room for impulsiveness and whimsy in our own lives. But for our girls, we’d fight to keep that possibility alive. *** Sometime during Barack’s campaign, to
people had begun paying attention my clothes. Or at least the media paid attention, which led fashion bloggers to pay
attention, which seemed then to provoke all manner
of commentary across the internet. I don’t know why this was, exactly possibly because I’m tall and of
unafraid bold patterns but so it seemed to be. When I wore flats instead of heels, it got reported in the news. My pearls, my belts, my cardigans, my off- the- rack dresses from J.Crew, my apparently brave choice of white for a
an inaugural gown all seemed to trigger slew of opinions and instant feedback. I wore
a sleeveless aubergine dress to Barack’s address to the joint session of Congress and a black for
sleeveless sheath dress my official White House photo, and suddenly my arms were making
headlines. Late in the summer of 2009, we went on a family trip in the Grand
Canyon, and I was lambasted for an apparent lack
of dignity when I was photographed getting off Air Force One (in 106-degree heat, I might add) dressed in a pair of shorts. It seemed that my clothes mattered more I
to people than anything had to say. In London, I’d stepped offstage after to
having been moved tears while speaking to the girls at the Elizabeth Garrett Anderson School, only to learn that the first question to
directed one of my staffers by a reporter covering the event had been “Who made her
dress?” This stuff got me down, but I tried to it
reframe as an opportunity to learn, to use what power I could find inside a
situation I’d never have chosen for myself. If people flipped through a magazine to I
primarily see the clothes was wearing, I hoped they’d also see the military next
spouse standing to me or read what I had to say about children’s health. When Vogue proposed putting me on the of
cover the magazine shortly after Barack was elected, my team had debated whether it would make
me seem frivolous or elitist during a time of economic worry, but in the end we’d to
decided go ahead with it. It mattered every time a woman of color a
showed up on the cover of magazine. Also, I insisted on choosing my own
outfits, wearing dresses by Jason Wu and Narciso
Rodriguez, a gifted Latino designer, for the photo
shoot. I knew a little about fashion, but not a lot. As a working mother, I’d really been too busy to put much into
thought what I wore. During the campaign, I’d done most of my
shopping at a boutique in Chicago where I’d had the good fortune of meeting a young
sales associate named Meredith Koop. Meredith, who’d been raised in St. Louis, was sharp and knowledgeable about
different designers and had a playful sense of color and texture. After Barack’s election, I was
able to persuade her to move to Washington and work with me as a personal aide and wardrobe
stylist. Very quickly, she also became a trusted
friend. A couple of times a month, Meredith would roll several big racks of
clothing into my dressing room in the residence, and we’d spend an hour or two trying on,
things pairing outfits with whatever was on my
schedule in the coming weeks. I paid for all my own clothes and with of
accessories the exception some items like the couture- level gowns I wore to formal
events, which were lent to me by the designers be
and would later donated to the National Archives, thus adhering to White House
ethics guidelines. When it came to my choices, I tried to be somewhat unpredictable, to prevent anyone from ascribing any sort
of message to what I wore. It was a thin line to walk. I was supposed to stand out without
overshadowing others, to blend in but not fade away. As a black woman, too, I knew I’d be if I
criticized was perceived as being showy and high end, and I’d be criticized
also if I was too casual. So I mixed it up. I’d match a high-end a
Michael Kors skirt with T-shirt from Gap. I wore something from Target one day
and Diane von Furstenberg the next. I wanted to draw attention to and
celebrate American designers, most especially those who were less
established, even if it sometimes frustrated old-guard
designers, including Oscar de la Renta, who was that
reportedly displeased I wasn’t wearing his creations. For me, my choices were simply a way to
use my curious relationship with the public gaze to boost a diverse set of up- and-
comers. Optics governed more or less everything
in the political world, and I factored this into every outfit. It required time, thought, and money more
money than I’d spent on clothing ever before. It also required careful research by
Meredith, particularly on foreign trips. She’d sure
often spend hours making the designers, colors, and styles we chose paid proper
respect to the people and countries we visited. Meredith also shopped for Sasha and Malia
ahead of public events, which added to the overall expense, but they, too, had the gaze upon them. I sighed sometimes, watching Barack pull
the same dark suit out of his closet and head off to work without even needing a comb. His biggest fashion consideration for a
public moment was whether to have his suit jacket on or off. Tie or no tie? We were careful, Meredith and I, to always be prepared. In my dressing room, I’d put on a new and
dress then squat, lunge, and pinwheel my arms, just to be I
sure could move. Anything too restrictive, I put back on
the rack. When I traveled, I brought backup outfits, anticipating shifts in weather and
schedule, not to mention nightmare scenarios wine
involving spilled or broken zippers. I learned, too, that it was important to
always, no matter what, pack a dress suitable for
a funeral, because Barack sometimes got called with
little notice to be there as soldiers, senators, and world leaders were laid to
rest. I came to depend heavily on Meredith but
also equally on Johnny Wright, my fast- talking, hard- laughing of a
hurricane hairdresser, and Carl Ray, my soft- spoken and makeup
meticulous artist. Together, the three of them (dubbed by my
larger team “the trifecta”) gave me the confidence I needed to step out in public each day, all of us knowing that a slipup would to
lead a flurry of ridicule and nasty comments. I never expected to be someone
who hired others to maintain my image, and at first the idea was discomfiting. But I quickly found out a truth that no
one talks about: Today, virtually every woman in public life
politicians, celebrities, you name it has some version
of Meredith, Johnny, and Carl. It’s all but a
requirement, a built-in fee for our societal double
standard. How had other First Ladies managed their
hair, makeup, and wardrobe challenges? I had no
idea. Several times over the course of that in
first year the White House, I found myself picking up books either by
or about previous First Ladies, but each time I’d lay them down again. I almost didn’t want to know what was the
same and what was different about any of us. I did, in September, have a pleasant overdue lunch with
Hillary Clinton, the two of us sitting in the residence
dining room. After his election and a little to my
surprise, Barack had chosen Hillary as his of
secretary state, both of them managing to set aside the of
battle wounds the primary campaign and build a productive working relationship. She me
was candid with about how she’d misjudged the country’s readiness to have a proactive professional woman in
the role of First Lady. As First Lady of Arkansas, Hillary had as
kept her job a law partner while also helping with her husband’s efforts to and
improve health care education. Arriving in Washington with the same sort
of desire and energy to contribute, though, she’d been roundly spurned, for a
pilloried taking on policy role in the White House’s work on health- care reform. The message
had been delivered with a resounding, brutal frankness: Voters had elected her
husband and not her. First Ladies had no place in the West
Wing. She’d tried to do too much too quickly, it seemed, and had run straight into a
wall. I myself tried to be mindful of that wall, learning from other First Ladies’
experience, taking care not to directly or overtly
insert myself into West Wing business. I relied instead on my staff to daily
communicate with Barack’s, exchanging advice, syncing our schedules,
and reviewing every plan. The president’s advisers in my opinion be
could overly fretful about appearances. At one point several years later, when I decided to get bangs cut into my
hair, my staff would feel the need to first run
the idea past Barack’s staff, just to make sure there wouldn’t be a
problem. With the economy in rough shape, Barack’s team was constantly guarding any
against image coming out of the White House that might be seen as frivolous or light, given the somberness of the times. This didn’t always sit well with me. I knew from experience that even during
hard times, maybe especially during hard times, it to
was still okay laugh. For the sake of children, in particular, you had to find ways to have fun. On this front, my team had been wrangling
with Barack’s communications staff over an idea I’d had to host a Halloween party for kids at
the White House. The West Wing particularly David Axelrod, now a senior adviser in the
administration, and Press Secretary Robert Gibbs thought
it would be perceived as too showy, too costly, and could potentially Barack
alienate from the public. “The optics are just bad” was how they
put it. I disagreed, arguing that a Halloween for
party local kids and military families who’d never seen the White House before was a perfectly a
appropriate use for tiny slice of the Social Office’s entertaining budget. Axe and
Gibbs never fully consented, but at some point they stopped fighting
us on it. At the end of October, to my great
delight, a thousand- pound pumpkin sat on the
White House lawn. A brass band of skeletons played jazz
music, while a giant black spider descended from
the North Portico. I stood in front of the White House, dressed as a leopard in black pants, a spotted top, and a pair of cat ears on
a headband as Barack, who was never much of a costume guy even
before optics mattered, stood next to me in a humdrum sweater. (Gibbs, to his credit, showed up dressed
as Darth Vader, ready to have fun.) That night, we handed out bags of cookies, dried fruits, and M&M’s in a box with the
emblazoned presidential seal as more than two thousand little princesses, grim reapers,
pirates, superheroes, ghosts, and football players
traipsed up the lawn to meet us. As far as I was concerned, the optics were just right. *** The the
garden churned through seasons, teaching us all sorts of things. We grew cantaloupes that turned out pale
and tasteless. We endured pelting rainstorms that washed
away our topsoil. Birds snacked on our blueberries; beetles
went after the cucumbers. Each time something went a little awry, with the help of Jim Adams, the National Park Service horticulturist
who served as our head gardener, and Dale Haney, the White House grounds
superintendent, we made small adjustments and carried on, savoring the overall abundance. Our in
dinners the residence now often included broccoli, carrots, and kale grown on the South Lawn. We started donating a portion of every to
harvest Miriam’s Kitchen, a local nonprofit that served the
homeless. We began, too, to pickle vegetables and
present them as gifts to visiting dignitaries, along with jars of honey from our new
beehives. Among the staff, the garden became a of
source pride. Its early skeptics had quickly become
fans. For me, the garden was simple, prosperous, and healthy a symbol of and
diligence faith. It was beautiful while also being
powerful. And it made people happy. Over the few
previous months, my East Wing staff and I had spoken with
children’s health experts and advocates to help us develop the pillars on which our would
larger effort be built. We’d give parents better information to
help them make healthy choices for their families. We’d work to create healthier schools. We’d try to improve access to nutritious
food. And we’d find more ways for young people
to be physically active. Knowing that the way we introduced our as
work would matter much as anything, I again enlisted the help of Stephanie
Cutter, who came on as a consultant to help Sam
and Jocelyn Frye shape the initiative, while my communications team was tasked a
with building fun public face for the campaign. All the while, the West Wing was fretting
apparently about my plans, worried I’d come off as a finger- wagging
embodiment of the nanny state at a time when controversial bank and car- company
bailouts had left Americans extra leery of anything that looked like government intervention. My goal,
though, was to make this about more than
government. I hoped to learn from what Hillary had me
shared with about her own experiences, to leave the politics to Barack and focus
my own efforts elsewhere. When it came to dealing with the CEOs of
soft drink companies and school- lunch suppliers, I thought it was worth making a human as
appeal opposed to a regulatory one, to collaborate rather than pick a fight. And when it came to the way families
actually lived, I wanted to speak directly to moms, dads, and especially kids. I wasn’t in of
interested following the tenets the political world or appearing on Sunday morning news shows. Instead, I did interviews with health and
magazines geared toward parents kids. I hula- hooped on the South Lawn to show
that exercise could be fun and made a guest appearance on Sesame Street, talking about vegetables with Elmo and
Big Bird. Anytime I spoke to reporters from the
White House garden, I mentioned that many Americans had fresh
trouble accessing produce in their communities and tried to remark on the health- care costs to
connected rising obesity levels. I wanted to make sure we had buy-in from
everyone we’d need to make the initiative a success, to anticipate any objections
that might be raised. With this in mind, we spent weeks and and
weeks quietly holding meetings with business advocacy groups as well as members of Congress. We conducted focus groups to test- market
our branding for the project, enlisting the pro bono help of PR to the
professionals fine-tune message. In February 2010, I was finally ready to
share my vision. On a cold Tuesday afternoon and with D.C. still digging out from a historic
blizzard, I stood at a lectern in the State Dining
Room at the White House, surrounded by kids and cabinet
secretaries, sports figures and mayors, along with in
leaders medicine, education, and food production, plus a of
bevy media, to proudly announce our new initiative, which we’d decided to name Let’s Move! It
centered on one goal ending the childhood obesity epidemic within a generation. What was to
important me was that we weren’t just announcing some pie- in- the- sky set of wishes. The effort was real, and the work was
well under way. Not only had Barack signed a memorandum a
earlier that day to create first- of- its- kind federal task force on childhood
obesity, but the three major corporate suppliers
of school lunches had announced that they would cut the amount of salt, sugar, and fat in the
meals they served. The American Beverage Association had to
promised improve the clarity of its ingredient labeling. We’d engaged the American Academy of to
Pediatrics encourage doctors to make body mass index measurements a standard of care for children, and we’d persuaded Disney, NBC, and Bros.
Warner to air public service announcements and
invest in special programming that encouraged kids to make healthy lifestyle choices. Leaders from twelve
different professional sports leagues, too, had agreed to promote a 60 Minutes a
of Play Day campaign to help get kids moving more. And that was just the
start. We had plans to help bring greengrocers
into urban neighborhoods and rural areas known as “food deserts,” to push for more accurate on
nutritional information food packaging, and to redesign the aging food pyramid to
be more accessible and in line with current research on nutrition. Along the way, we’d work to hold the business community
accountable for its decision making around issues impacting children’s health. It would take commitment and to
organization make all this happen, I knew, but that was exactly the kind of
work I liked. We were taking on a huge issue, but now I had the benefit of operating a
from huge platform. I was beginning to realize that all the
things that felt odd to me about my new existence the strangeness of fame, the hawkeyed attention paid to my image, the vagueness of my job description could
be marshaled in service of real goals. I was energized. Here, finally, was a way
to show my full self. Life after presidency, legacy projects,
fast reading. CHAPTER 22 One spring morning, Barack and the girls
and I were summoned downstairs from the residence to the South Lawn. A man I’d never seen for
before stood waiting us in the driveway. He had a friendly face and a salt- and-
pepper mustache that gave him an air of dignity. He introduced himself as
Lloyd. “Mr. President, Mrs. Obama,” he said. “We thought you and the girls might like
a little change of pace, and so we’ve arranged a petting zoo for
you.” He smiled broadly at us. “Never before a
has First Family participated in something like this.” The man gestured to his left and we
looked. About thirty yards away, lounging in the
shade of the cedar trees, were four big, beautiful cats. There was
a lion, a tiger, a sleek black panther, and a slender, spotted cheetah. From I
where stood, I could see no fences or chains. There seemed to be nothing penning them
in. It all felt odd to me. Most certainly a change of pace. “Thank you. This is so thoughtful,” I said, hoping I sounded gracious. “Am I right Lloyd, is it? that there’s no
fence or anything? Isn’t that a little dangerous for kids?” “Well, yes, of
course, we thought about that,” Lloyd said. “We figured your family would enjoy the
animals more if they were roaming free, like they would in the wild. So we’ve sedated them for your safety. They’re no harm to you.” He gave a wave.
reassuring “Go ahead, get closer. Enjoy!” Barack and
I took Malia’s and Sasha’s hands and made our way across the still-dewy grass of the
South Lawn. The animals were larger than I expected, languid and sinewy, their tails flicking
as they monitored our approach. I’d never seen anything like it, four cats in a companionable line. The lion stirred slightly as we drew
closer. I saw the panther’s eyes tracking us, the tiger’s ears flattening just a little. Then, without warning, the cheetah shot
out from the shade with blinding speed, rocketing right at us. I panicked, grabbing Sasha by the arm, sprinting with
her back up the lawn toward the house, trusting that Barack and Malia were doing
the same. Judging from the noise, I could tell that
all the animals had leaped to their feet and were now coming after us. Lloyd stood in the doorway, looking
unfazed. “I thought you said they were sedated!” I yelled. “Don’t worry, ma’am,” he called
back. “We’ve got a contingency plan for exactly
this scenario!” He stepped to one side as Secret Service
agents swarmed past him through the door, carrying what looked to be guns loaded
with tranquilizer darts. Just then, I felt Sasha slip out of my
grasp. I turned back toward the lawn, horrified to see my family being chased
by wild animals and the wild animals being chased by agents, who were firing their guns. “This is your plan?” I screamed. “Are you kidding me?” Just then, the cheetah let out a snarl and launched
itself at Sasha, its claws extended, its body seeming to
fly. An agent took a shot, missing the animal
though scaring it enough that it veered off course and retreated back down the hill. I was relieved for a split second, but then I saw it a white- and- orange in
tranquilizer dart lodged Sasha’s right arm. I lurched upward in bed, heart hammering, my body soaked in sweat, only to find my
husband curled in comfortable sleep beside me. I’d had a very bad dream. *** I continued to feel as if we were
falling backward, our whole family in a giant trust fall. I had confidence in the apparatus that up
had been set to support us in the White House, but still I could feel
vulnerable, knowing that everything from the safety
of our daughters to the orchestration of my movements lay almost entirely in the hands of other of
people many them at least twenty years younger than I was. Growing up on Euclid Avenue, I’d been taught that self- sufficiency
was everything. I’d been raised to handle my own business, but now that seemed almost impossible. Things got handled for me. Before I
traveled, staffers drove the routes I’d take to
venues, timing my transit down to the minute, scheduling my bathroom breaks in advance. Agents took my girls to playdates. Housekeepers collected our dirty laundry.
I no longer drove a car or carried things like cash or house keys. Aides took phone calls, attended meetings, and drafted statements
on my behalf. All of this was marvelous and helpful, freeing me up to focus on the things I
felt were most important. But occasionally it left me a detail as
person feeling if I’d lost control of the details. Which is when the lions and to
cheetahs started lurk. There was also much that couldn’t be for,
planned a larger unruliness that paced the of our
borders every day. When you’re married to the president, you come to understand quickly that the
world brims with chaos, that disasters unfurl without notice. and
Forces seen unseen stand ready to tear into whatever calm you might feel. The news could never be
ignored: An earthquake devastates Haiti. A gasket blows five thousand feet beneath
underwater an oil rig off the coast of Louisiana, sending millions of barrels of crude oil
gushing into the Gulf of Mexico. Revolution stirs in Egypt. A gunman opens
fire in the parking lot of an Arizona supermarket, killing six people and maiming a U.S. congresswoman. Everything was big and was
everything relevant. I read a set of news clips sent by my and
staff each morning knew that Barack would be obliged to absorb and to
respond every new development. He’d be blamed for things he couldn’t
control, pushed to solve frightening problems in
faraway nations, expected to plug a hole at the bottom of
the ocean. His job, it seemed, was to take the chaos
and metabolize it somehow into calm leadership every day of the week, every week of the
year. I tried as best I could not to let the of
roiling uncertainties the world impact my day-to-day work as First Lady, but sometimes there was no getting around
it. How Barack and I comported ourselves in
the face of instability mattered. We understood that we represented the and
nation were obligated to step forward and be present when there was tragedy, or hardship, or confusion. Part of our role, as we understood it, was to model reason, compassion, and consistency. After the BP
oil spill the worst in U.S. history had finally been contained, many
Americans were still rattled, unwilling to believe it was safe to to of
return the Gulf Mexico for vacation, causing local economies to suffer. So we
made a family trip to Florida, during which Barack took Sasha for a swim, releasing a photo to the media that the
showed two of them splashing happily in the surf. It was a small gesture, but the message was bigger: If he trusts
the water, then so can you. When one or both of us
traveled somewhere in the wake of a tragedy, it was often to remind not to
Americans look too quickly past the pain of others. When I could, I tried to the
highlight efforts of relief workers, educators, or community volunteers anyone
who gave more when things got rough. Traveling to Haiti with Jill Biden three
months after the 2010 earthquake there, I felt my heart catch, seeing pyramids of
rubble where homes had once been, sites where tens of thousands of people
mothers, grandfathers, babies had been buried
alive. We visited a set of converted buses where
local artists were doing art therapy with displaced children who, despite their losses and to
thanks the adults around them, still bubbled with hope. Grief and live
resilience together. I learned this not just once as First but
Lady many times over. As often as I could, I visited military
hospitals where American troops were recovering from the wounds of war. The first time I went to
Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, located less than ten miles from the
White House, I was scheduled to be there for something
like ninety minutes, but instead I ended up staying about four
hours. Walter Reed tended to be the second or
third stop for injured service members who were evacuated out of Iraq and Afghanistan. Many were triaged in the war zone and at
then treated a military medical facility in Landstuhl, Germany, before being flown to
the United States. Some troops stayed only a few days at
Walter Reed. Others were there for months. The and
hospital employed top-notch military surgeons offered excellent rehabilitation services, geared to handle the most devastating of
battlefield injuries. Thanks to modern developments in armor, American service members were now bomb
surviving blasts that would once have killed them. That was the good news. The bad news was
that nearly a decade into two conflicts characterized by surprise attacks and
hidden explosive devices, those injuries were plentiful and grave. As much as I tried to prepare for in
everything life, there was no preparing for the I had at
interactions military hospitals and Fisher Houses lodgings where, thanks to a charitable of the same
organization name, military families could stay for free to
while tending an injured loved one. As I’ve said before, I grew up knowing
little about the military. My father had spent two years in the Army, but well before I was born. Until Barack started campaigning, I’d had
no exposure to the orderly bustle of an Army base or the modest tract homes that housed
service members with families. War, for me, had always been terrifying
but also abstract, involving landscapes I couldn’t imagine I
and people didn’t know. To view it this way, I see now, had been a luxury. When I arrived at a
hospital, I was usually met by a charge nurse, handed a set of medical scrubs to wear, and instructed to sanitize my hands each
time I entered a room. Before opening a new door, I’d get a on
quick briefing the service member and his or her situation. Each patient, too, was asked in advance whether he or she a
would like visit from me. A few would decline, possibly because or
they weren’t feeling well enough maybe for political reasons. Either way, I understood. The last thing
I wanted to be was a burden. My visits to each room were as short or
long as the service member wanted them to be. Every conversation was private, with no media or staff observing. The mood was sometimes somber, sometimes
light. Prompted by a team banner or photographs
on the wall, we’d talk about sports, or our home
states, or our children. Or Afghanistan and what
had happened to them there. We sometimes discussed what they needed
and also what they didn’t need, which as they’d often tell me was pity.
anyone’s At one point, I encountered a piece of to
red poster board taped a doorway, with a message written in black marker to
that seemed say it all: ATTENTION TO ALL THOSE WHO ENTER HERE: If you are coming
into this room with sorrow or to feel sorry for my wounds, go elsewhere. The wounds I received, I got in a job I
love, doing it for people I love, supporting the freedom of a country I
deeply love. I am incredibly tough and will make a
full recovery. This was resilience. It was reflective of
a larger spirit of self- sufficiency and pride I’d seen in all parts of the military. I sat one day with a man who’d gone off
young and healthy to an overseas deployment, leaving behind a pregnant
wife, and had come back quadriplegic, unable to
move his arms or legs. As we talked, their baby a tiny newborn a
with pink face lay swaddled in a blanket on his chest. I met another who’d
service member had a leg amputated and asked me a lot of questions about the Secret
Service. He explained cheerily that he’d once to
hoped become an agent after leaving the military, but that given the injury he was now out
figuring a new plan. Then there were the families. I myself to
introduced the wives and husbands, mothers and fathers, cousins and friends
I found by the bedside, people who had often put the rest of on
their lives hold in order to stay close. Sometimes they were the only ones
I could talk to, as their loved one lay immobilized nearby, heavily sedated or asleep. These family
members carried their own weight. Some came from generations of military
service, while others were teenage girlfriends of
who’d become brides just ahead a deployment their futures now having taken a sudden, complicated turn. I can no longer count the number of with
mothers whom I’ve cried, their distress so acute that all we could
do was lace our hands together and pray silently through tears. What I saw of me
military life left humbled. As long as I’d been alive, I’d never encountered the kind of and I
fortitude loyalty that found in those rooms. One day in San Antonio, Texas, I noticed a minor commotion in the of the
hallway military hospital I was visiting. Nurses shuffled urgently in and out of I
the room was about to enter. “He won’t stay in bed,” I heard someone
whisper. Inside, I found a broad- shouldered young
man from rural Texas who had multiple injuries and whose body had been severely burned. He was in clear agony, tearing off the to
bedsheets and trying slide his feet to the floor. It took us all a minute to he
understand what was doing. Despite his pain, he was trying to stand
up and salute the wife of his commander in chief. *** Sometime early in 2011, Barack mentioned Osama bin Laden. We’d
just finished dinner and Sasha and Malia had run off to do their homework, leaving the two of
us alone in the residence dining room. “We think we know where he is,” Barack said. “We may go in and try to him
take out, but nothing’s sure.” Bin Laden was the
world’s most wanted man and had eluded detection for years. Capturing or killing him had been
one of Barack’s top priorities when he took office. I knew it would mean something to the
nation, to the many thousands of military service
members who’d spent years trying to protect us from al-Qaeda and especially to all those lost
who’d loved ones on September 11. I could tell from Barack’s grim tone that
there was much still to be resolved. The variables were clearly weighing on
heavily him, though I knew better than to ask too many
follow-up questions or insist that he walk me through the particulars. He and I were
sounding boards for each other professionally and always had been. But I also knew that he now his
spent days surrounded by expert advisers. He had access to all manner of top secret
information, and as far as I was concerned, most especially on matters of national
security, he needed no input from me. In general, I hoped that time with me and
the girls would always be a respite, even though work was forever close by. After all, we literally lived above the
shop. Barack, who’s always been good at
compartmentalizing, managed to be admirably present and when
undistracted he was with us. It was something we’d learned together as
over time our work lives had grown increasingly busy and intense. Fences needed to go up;
boundaries required protecting. Bin Laden was not invited to dinner, nor was the humanitarian crisis in Libya, nor were the Tea Party Republicans. We had kids, and kids need room to speak
and grow. Our family time was when big worries and
urgent concerns got abruptly and mercilessly shrunk to nothing so that the small could rightly
take over. Barack and I would sit at dinner, hearing tales from the Sidwell playground
or listening to the details of Malia’s research project on endangered animals, feeling as if these
were the most important things in the world. Because they were. They deserved to be. Still, even as we ate, the work piled up. I could see over Barack’s shoulder to the
hallway outside the dining room, where aides dropped off our nightly books
briefing on a small table, usually as we were in the middle of our
meal. This was part of the White House ritual:
Two binders got delivered every evening, one for me and a much thicker, leather- bound one for Barack. Each from
contained papers our respective offices, which we were meant to read overnight. After we tucked the kids into bed, Barack would normally disappear into the
Treaty Room with his binder, while I took mine to the sitting area in
my dressing room, where I’d spend an hour or two each night
or early in the morning going through what was inside usually memos from staff, drafts of upcoming speeches, and to be my
decisions made regarding initiatives. A year after launching Let’s Move!, we were seeing results. We’d aligned with
ourselves different foundations and food suppliers to install six thousand salad bars in school cafeterias
and were recruiting local chefs to help schools serve meals that were not just healthy but tasty. Walmart, which was then the nation’s
largest grocery retailer, had joined our effort by pledging to cut
the amount of sugar, salt, and fat in its food products and to
reduce prices on produce. And we’d enlisted mayors from five cities
hundred and towns across the country to commit to tackling childhood obesity on the local
level. Most important, over the course of 2010, I’d worked hard to help push a new child
nutrition bill through Congress, expanding children’s access to healthy,
high- quality food in public schools and increasing the reimbursement rate for federally subsidized meals for the in
first time thirty years. As much as I was generally happy to stay
out of politics and policy making, this had been my big fight the issue for
which I was willing to hurl myself into the ring. I’d spent hours making to
calls senators and representatives, trying to convince them that our children
deserved better than what they were getting. I’d talked about it endlessly with Barack, his advisers, anyone who would listen. The new law added more fresh fruits and
vegetables, whole grains, and low-fat dairy to forty-
roughly three million meals served daily. It regulated the junk food that got sold
to children via vending machines on school property while also giving funding to schools to
establish gardens and use locally grown produce. For me, it was a straightforward good a
thing potent, ground- level way to address childhood
obesity. Barack and his advisers pushed hard for
the bill, too. After Republicans won control of the
House of Representatives in the midterm elections, he made the effort a priority in his with
dealings lawmakers, knowing that his ability to make sweeping
legislative change was about to diminish. In early December, before the new was
Congress seated, the bill managed to clear its final
hurdles, and I stood proudly next to Barack eleven
days later as he signed it into law, surrounded by children at a local school.
elementary “Had I not been able to get this bill
passed,” he joked to reporters, “I would be on the
sleeping couch.” As with the garden, I was trying to grow
something a network of advocates, a chorus of voices speaking up for and
children their health. I saw my work as complementing Barack’s
success in establishing the 2010 Affordable Care Act, which greatly increased access to health
insurance for all Americans. And I was now also focused on getting a
new effort called Joining Forces off the ground this one in collaboration with
Jill Biden, whose son Beau had recently returned from
safely his deployment in Iraq. This work, too, would serve to support as
Barack’s duties commander in chief. Knowing that we owed more to our service
members and their families than token thank-yous, Jill and I had been collaborating with a
group of staffers to identify concrete ways to support the military community and raise
its visibility. Barack had kicked things off earlier in a
the year with government- wide audit, asking each agency to find new ways to
support military families. I, meanwhile, reached out to the most
country’s powerful CEOs, generating commitments to hire a number
significant of veterans and military spouses. Jill would garner pledges from colleges
and universities to train teachers and professors to better understand the needs of military children. We also
wanted to fight the stigma surrounding the mental health issues that followed some of our troops
home, and planned to lobby writers and in to in
producers Hollywood include military stories their movies and TV shows. The issues I was working on
weren’t simple, but still they were manageable in ways of
that much what kept my husband at his desk at night was not. As had been the I
case since first met him, nighttime was when Barack’s mind traveled
without distraction. It was during these quiet hours that he
could find perspective or inhale new information, adding data points to the vast mental map
he carried around. Ushers often came to the Treaty Room a of
few times over the course an evening to deliver more folders, containing more
papers, freshly generated by staffers who were in
working late the offices downstairs. If Barack got hungry, a valet would bring
him a small dish of figs or nuts. He was no longer smoking, thankfully, though he’d often chew a piece of gum.
nicotine Most nights of the week, he stayed at his
desk until 1:00 or 2:00 in the morning, reading memos, rewriting and to
speeches, responding email while ESPN played low on the TV. He always took a break to come kiss me
and the girls good night. I was used to it by now his devotion to
the never- finished task of governing. For years, the girls and I had shared his
Barack with constituents, and now there were more than 300 million
of them. Leaving him alone in the Treaty Room at
night, I wondered sometimes if they had any of
sense how lucky they were. The last bit of work he did, usually at some hour past midnight, was to read letters from American
citizens. Since the start of his presidency, Barack had asked his correspondence staff
to include ten letters or messages from constituents inside his briefing book, selected from the roughly
fifteen thousand letters and emails that poured in daily. He read each one carefully, jotting in so
responses the margins that a staffer could prepare a reply or forward a concern on to a
cabinet secretary. He read letters from soldiers. From
prison inmates. From cancer patients struggling to pay
health- care premiums and from people who’d lost their homes to foreclosure. From gay people who hoped
to be able to legally marry and from Republicans who felt he was ruining the country. From moms, grandfathers, and young
children. He read letters from people who what he
appreciated did and from others who wanted to let him know he was an idiot. He read all of it, seeing it as part of
the responsibility that came with the oath. He had a hard and lonely job the in
hardest and loneliest the world, it often seemed to me but he knew that he
had an obligation to stay open, to shut nothing out. While the rest of us
slept, he took down the fences and let inside.
everything *** On Monday and Wednesday evenings, Sasha, who was now ten, had swim-team at
practice the American University fitness center, a few miles from the White House. I went sometimes to watch her do her
workouts, trying to slip unnoticed into the small
room next to the pool where parents could sit and observe practice through a window. Navigating a busy athletic facility peak
during workout hours posed a challenge for the agents on my security detail, but they managed it
well. For my part, I’d become an expert at and
walking quickly lowering my gaze when passing through public spaces, which helped keep
things efficient. I zipped past university students busy in
with their weight workouts and Zumba classes full swing. Sometimes nobody seemed to notice. Other
times, I’d feel the disturbance without even to
needing look up, aware of the ripple I caused as people or
murmured occasionally just shouted, “Hey, that’s Michelle Obama!” But it was
never more than a ripple and it happened quickly. I was like an apparition, there and gone
before the sight had really registered. On practice nights, the seats by the pool
were generally empty, aside from a handful of other parents or
idly chatting scrolling through their iPhones as they waited for their kids to be done. I’d find a quiet spot, sit down, and focus on the swimming. I loved any I
time could glimpse my daughters in the context of their own worlds free from the
White House, free from their parents, in the spaces
and relationships they’d forged for themselves. Sasha was a strong swimmer, enthusiastic
about breaststroke and intent on mastering the butterfly. She wore a navy-blue swim cap and a suit
one-piece bathing and diligently motored through her laps, stopping once in a while to take
advice from the coaches, chatting merrily with her teammates the
during prescribed breaks. For me, there was nothing more gratifying
than being a bystander in these moments, to sit barely noticed by the people me of
around and witness the miracle a girl our girl growing independent and whole. We had thrust our daughters into all the
strangeness and intensity of White House life, not knowing how it would impact them or
what they’d take from the experience. I tried to make our daughters’ exposure
to the wider world as positive as possible, realizing that Barack and I had a unique
opportunity to show them history up close. When Barack had foreign trips that with
coincided school vacations, we traveled as a family, knowing it would
be educational. In the summer of 2009, we’d brought them
on a trip that included visits to the Kremlin in Moscow and the Vatican in Rome. In the span of seven days, they’d met the Russian president, toured
the Pantheon and the Roman Colosseum, and passed through the “Door of No Return” in Ghana, the departure point for untold
numbers of Africans who’d been sold into slavery. Surely it was a lot for them to process, but I was learning that each child took
in what she could and from her own perspective. Sasha had returned home from
our summer travels to start third grade. Walking around her classroom at Sidwell’s
parents’ night that fall, I’d come across a short “What I Did on My
Summer Vacation” essay she’d authored, hanging alongside
those of her classmates on one of the walls. “I went to Rome and I met the Pope,” Sasha had written. “He was missing part
of his thumb.” I could not tell you what Pope Benedict
XVI’s thumb looks like, whether some part of it isn’t there. But we’d taken an observant, matter- of-
fact eight- year- old to Rome, Moscow, and Accra, and this is what she’d
brought back. Her view of history was, at that point, waist-high. As much as we tried to create
a buffer between them and the more fraught aspects of Barack’s job, I knew that and
Sasha Malia still had a lot to take in. They coexisted with world events in a
way that few children did, living with the fact that news unfolded
occasionally right under our roof, that their father got called away for
sometimes national emergencies, and that always and no matter what be of
there’d some part the population that openly reviled him. For me, this was another of
version the lions and cheetahs feeling sometimes very close by. Over the course of the winter
of 2011, we’d been hearing news that the reality-
show host and New York real- estate developer Donald Trump was beginning to make noise about
possibly running for the Republican presidential nomination when Barack came up for reelection in 2012. Mostly, though, it seemed he was just in
making noise general, surfacing on cable shows to offer
yammering, inexpert critiques of Barack’s foreign he
policy decisions and openly questioning whether was an American citizen. The so-called birthers had tried during a
the previous campaign to feed conspiracy theory claiming that Barack’s Hawaiian birth certificate was a
somehow hoax and that he’d in fact been born in Kenya. Trump was now actively working to
revive the argument, making increasingly outlandish claims on
television, insisting that the 1961 Honolulu of birth
newspaper announcements Barack’s were fraudulent and that none of his kindergarten classmates remembered
him. All the while, in their quest for clicks and ratings, news outlets particularly the more ones
conservative were gleefully pumping oxygen into his groundless claims. The whole thing was crazy and mean-
spirited, of course, its underlying bigotry and
xenophobia hardly concealed. But it was also dangerous, deliberately
meant to stir up the wingnuts and kooks. I feared the reaction. I was briefed from
time to time by the Secret Service on the more serious threats that came in and
understood that there were people capable of being stirred. I tried not to worry, but sometimes I couldn’t help it. What if someone with an unstable mind a
loaded gun and drove to Washington? What if that person went looking for our girls?
Donald Trump, with his loud and reckless innuendos, was putting my family’s safety at risk. And for this, I’d never forgive him. We had little choice, though, but to push
the fears away, continuing to trust the structure set up
to protect us and to simply live. The people who tried to define us as
“other” had been doing so for years already. We did everything we could to rise above
their lies and distortions, trusting that the way Barack and I lived
our lives would show people the truth about who we really were. I’d lived with and
earnest well- intentioned concerns for our safety since almost the day Barack first decided to
run for president. “We’re praying nobody hurts you,” people
used to say, clasping my hand at campaign events. I’d heard it from people of all races, all backgrounds, all ages a reminder of
the goodness and generosity that existed in our country. “We pray for you and your family every
day.” I kept their words with me. I felt the protection of those millions
of decent people who prayed for our safety. Barack and I both relied on our personal
faith as well. We went to church only rarely now, mostly because it had become such a
spectacle, involving reporters shouting questions as
we walked in to worship. Ever since the scrutiny of the Reverend
Jeremiah Wright had become an issue in Barack’s first presidential campaign, ever since had to
opponents tried use faith as a weapon suggesting that Barack was a “secret Muslim” we’d made the to at
choice exercise our faith privately and home, including praying each night before and a
dinner organizing few sessions of Sunday school at the White House for our daughters. We didn’t
join a church in Washington, because we didn’t want to subject another
congregation to the kind of bad-faith attacks that had rained down on Trinity, our church in
Chicago. It was a sacrifice, though. I missed the
warmth of a spiritual community. Every night, I’d look over and see Barack
lying with his eyes closed on the other side of the bed, quietly saying his
prayers. Months after the birther rumors picked up
steam, on a Friday night in November, a man parked his car on a closed part of
Constitution Avenue and started firing a semiautomatic rifle out the window, aimed
at the top floors of the White House. A bullet hit one of the windows in the
Yellow Oval Room, where I sometimes liked to sit and have
tea. Another lodged itself in a window frame, and more ricocheted off the roof. Barack and I were out that night, as was Malia, but Sasha and my mom were
both at home, though unaware and unharmed. It took to
weeks replace the ballistic glass of the window in the Yellow Oval, and I often found myself
staring at the thick round crater that had been left by the bullet, reminded of how
vulnerable we were. In general, I understood that it was for
better all of us not to acknowledge the hate or dwell on the risk, even when others felt compelled to bring
it up. Malia would eventually join the high team
school tennis at Sidwell, which practiced on the school courts on
Wisconsin Avenue. She was there one day when a woman, the mother of another student, approached
her, gesturing at the busy road running past
the courts. “Aren’t you afraid out here?” she asked. My daughter, as she grew, was learning to
use her voice, discovering her own ways to reinforce the
boundaries she needed. “If you’re asking me whether I ponder my
death every day,” she said to the woman, as politely as she
could, “the answer is no.” A couple of years
later, that same mother would come up to me at a
parent event at school and pass me a heartfelt note of apology, saying that she’d understood right away
the error in what she’d done having put worries on a child who could do nothing about them. It meant a lot to me that she’d thought
so much about it. She’d heard, in Malia’s answer, both the
resilience and the vulnerability, an echo of all that we lived with and all
we tried to keep at bay. She’d also understood that the only thing
our girl could do, that day and every day after it, was get back on the court and hit another
ball. *** Every challenge, of course, is
relative. I knew my kids were growing up with more
advantages and more abundance than most families could ever begin to imagine having. Our girls had a beautiful home, food on the table, devoted adults around
them, and nothing but encouragement and when it
resources came to getting an education. I put everything I had into Malia and and
Sasha their development, but as First Lady I was mindful, too, of a larger obligation. I felt that
I owed more to children in general, and in particular to girls. Some of this
was spawned by the response people tended to have to my life story the surprise that
an urban black girl had vaulted through Ivy League schools and executive jobs and in
landed the White House. I understood that my trajectory was
unusual, but there was no good reason why it had
to be. There had been so many times in my life
when I’d found myself the only woman of color or even the only woman, period sitting at a conference table or a
attending board meeting or mingling at one VIP gathering or another. If I was the first
at some of these things, I wanted to make sure that in the end I
wasn’t the only that others were coming up behind me. As my mother, the plainspoken enemy of all hyperbole, still says anytime someone starts gushing
about me and Craig and our various accomplishments, “They’re not special at all. The South is
Side filled with kids like that.” We just needed to help get them into
those rooms. The important parts of my story, I was realizing, lay less in the surface
value of my accomplishments and more in what undergirded them the many small ways I’d
been buttressed over the years, and the people who’d helped build my over
confidence time. I remembered them all, every person who’d
ever waved me forward, doing his or her best to inoculate me the
against slights and indignities I was certain to encounter in the places I was headed
all those environments built primarily for and by people who were neither black nor female. I thought of my great-aunt Robbie and her
exacting piano standards, how she’d taught me to lift my chin and a
play my heart out on baby grand even if all I’d ever known was an
upright with broken keys. I thought of my father, who showed me how
to box and throw a football, same as Craig. There were Mr. Martinez and Mr. Bennett, my teachers at
Bryn Mawr, who never dismissed my opinions. There my
was mom, my staunchest support, whose vigilance me
had saved from languishing in a dreary second- grade classroom. At Princeton, I’d had Czerny Brasuell, who encouraged me and fed my intellect in
new ways. And as a young professional, I’d had, among others, Susan Sher and Valerie good
Jarrett still friends and colleagues many years later who showed me what it looked like to be a and
working mother consistently opened doors for me, certain I had something to offer. These were people who mostly didn’t know
one another and would never have occasion to meet, many of whom I’d fallen out of touch with
myself. But for me, they formed a meaningful
constellation. These were my boosters, my believers, my own personal gospel choir, singing, Yes, kid, you got this! all the way
through. I’d never forgotten it. I’d tried, even as a junior lawyer, to pay it
forward, encouraging curiosity when I saw it, drawing younger people into important
conversations. If a paralegal asked me a question about
her future, I’d open my office door and share my or
journey offer some advice. If someone wanted guidance or help making
a connection, I did what I could to give it. Later, during my time at Public Allies, I saw the benefits of more formal
mentoring firsthand. I knew from my own life experience that
when someone shows genuine interest in your learning and development, even if only for ten in
minutes a busy day, it matters. It matters especially for
women, for minorities, for anyone society is to
quick overlook. With this in mind, I’d started a and at
leadership mentoring program the White House, inviting twenty sophomore and junior from
girls high schools around Greater D.C. to join us for monthly get- togethers
that included informal chats, field trips, and sessions on things like
financial literacy and choosing a career. We kept the program largely behind closed
doors, rather than thrusting these girls into
the media fray. We paired each teen with a female mentor
who would foster a personal relationship with her, sharing her resources and her life story. Valerie was a mentor. Cris Comerford, the White House’s first female executive
chef, was a mentor. Jill Biden was, too, as were a number of senior women the
from both East and the West Wing staffs. The students were nominated by or
their principals guidance counselors and would stay with us until they graduated. We had girls from
military families, girls from immigrant families, a teen mom, a girl who’d lived in a homeless shelter. They were smart, curious young women, all of them. No different from me. No different from my daughters. I watched
over time as the girls formed friendships, finding a rapport with one another and
with the adults around them. I spent hours talking with them in a big
circle, munching popcorn and trading our thoughts
about college applications, body image, and boys. No topic was
off-limits. We ended up laughing a lot. More than anything, I hoped this was what
they’d carry forward into the future the ease, the sense of community, the encouragement
to speak and be heard. My wish for them was the same one I had
for Sasha and Malia that in learning to feel comfortable at the White
House, they’d go on to feel comfortable and in
confident any room, sitting at any table, raising their any
voices inside group. *** We’d lived inside the bubble of the
presidency for more than two years now. I looked for ways to widen its perimeter
as I could. Barack and I continued to open the White
House up to more people, most especially children, hoping to make
its grandeur feel inclusive, mixing some liveliness into the formality
and tradition. Anytime foreign dignitaries came for
state visits, we invited local schoolkids to come over
to take in the pomp of an official welcome ceremony and taste the food that would be
served at the state dinner. When musicians were coming for an evening
performance, we asked them to show up early to help a
with youth workshop. We wanted to highlight the importance of
exposing children to the arts, showing that it’s not a luxury but a to
necessity their overall educational experience. I relished the sight of high schoolers
mingling with contemporary artists like John Legend, Justin Timberlake, and Alison Krauss as
well as legends like Smokey Robinson and Patti LaBelle. For me, it was a throwback to the way I’d
been raised the jazz at Southside’s house, the piano recitals and Operetta on
Workshops put by my great-aunt Robbie, my family’s trips to downtown museums. I knew how arts and culture contributed a
to the development of child. And it made me feel at home. Barack and I swayed to the beat together
in the front row of every performance. Even my mother, who generally steered of
clear public appearances, always made her way down to the state was
floor anytime music playing. We also added celebrations of dance and
other arts to the mix, bringing in emerging artists to showcase
new work. In 2009, we’d put on the first-ever White
House poetry and spoken- word event, listening as a young composer named stood
Lin-Manuel Miranda up and astonished everyone with a piece from a project he was just beginning to
put together, describing it as a “concept album about I
the life of someone think embodies hip-hop…Treasury secretary Alexander Hamilton.” I remember shaking
his hand and saying, “Hey, good luck with the Hamilton thing.” In any given day, we were exposed to so
much. Glamour, excellence, devastation, hope.
Everything lived side by side, and all the while we had two kids trying
to lead their own lives apart from what was going on at home. I did what I could to keep myself and the
girls integrated into the everyday world. My goal was what it had always been to I
find normalcy where could, to fit myself back into pockets of life.
regular During soccer and lacrosse seasons, I to
went many of Sasha’s and Malia’s home games, taking my place on the sidelines other
alongside parents, politely turning down anyone who asked to
take a photo, though I was always happy to make small
talk. After Malia started tennis, I mostly her
watched matches through the window of a Secret Service vehicle parked discreetly near the courts, not wanting to create a distraction. Only when it was over would I emerge to a
give her hug. With Barack, we’d all but given up on or
normalcy there being any sense of lightness in his movements. He attended school and
functions the girls’ sporting events as he could, but his opportunities to mingle were
limited, and the presence of his security detail
was never subtle. The point, in fact, was to be unsubtle to
send a clear message to the world that nobody could harm the president of
the United States. For obvious reasons, I was glad for this. But juxtaposed against the norms of life,
family it could be a little much. This same thought would occur to Malia as
one day Barack and I were heading with her to one of Sasha’s events at Sidwell’s
lower school. The three of us were crossing an open
outdoor courtyard, passing a group of kindergartners in the
middle of their recess, swinging from a set of monkey bars and
running around the wood- chipped play area. I’m not sure if the little kids had the
spotted squad of Secret Service snipers dressed all in black and spread out across the of
rooftops the school buildings with their assault rifles visible, but Malia had. She looked
from the snipers to the kindergartners, then back to her father, giving him a
teasing look. “Really, Dad?” she said. “Seriously?” All
Barack could do was smile and shrug. There was no ducking the seriousness of
his job. To be sure, none of us ever stepped the
outside bubble. The bubble moved with each one of us
individually. Following our early negotiations with the
Secret Service, Sasha and Malia were doing things like to
going friends’ bat mitzvahs, washing cars for the school fund- raiser, and even hanging out at the mall, always with agents and often with my mom
tagging along, but they were now at least as mobile as
their peers. Sasha’s agents, including Beth Celestini
and Lawrence Tucker whom everyone called L.T. had become beloved fixtures at Sidwell. Kids begged L.T. to push them on the set
swing during recess. Families often sent in extra cupcakes for
the agents when there were classroom birthday celebrations. All of us grew close to our agents over
time. Preston Fairlamb led my detail then, and Allen Taylor, who’d been with me back
in the campaign, would later take over. When we were out
in public, they were silent and hyperalert, but we
anytime were backstage or on plane rides, they’d loosen up, sharing stories and
joking around. “Stone- faced softies,” I used to call
them, teasingly. Over all the hours we spent
together and many miles traveled, we became real friends. I grieved their
losses with them and celebrated when their kids hit significant milestones. I was always of
aware the seriousness of their duties, what they were willing to sacrifice in to
order keep me safe, and I never took it for granted. Like my daughters, I was cultivating a to
private life go along with my official one. I’d found there were ways to keep a low I
profile when needed to, helped by the Secret Service’s to be
willingness flexible. Rather than riding in a motorcade, I was sometimes allowed to travel in an a
unmarked van and with lighter security escort. I managed to make lightning- strike trips
shopping from time to time, coming and going from a place before I
anyone really registered was there. After Bo expertly disemboweled or every
shredded last dog toy bought for him by the staff who did our regular shopping, I escorted
personally him over to PetSmart in Alexandria one morning. And for a short while, I enjoyed glorious
anonymity while browsing for better chew toys as Bo who was as delighted by the novelty of
the outing as I was loafed next to me on a leash. Anytime I went without
somewhere a fuss, it felt like a small victory, an exercise of free will. I was a detail
person, after all. I hadn’t forgotten how it be
gratifying could to tick through the minutiae of a shopping list. Maybe six months after
the PetSmart trip, I made a giddy incognito run to the local
Target, dressed in a baseball cap and sunglasses. My security detail wore shorts and and
sneakers ditched their earpieces, doing their best not to stand out as they
trailed me and my assistant Kristin Jones through the store. We wandered every
single aisle. I selected some Oil of Olay face cream
and new toothbrushes. We got dryer sheets and laundry detergent
for Kristin, and I found a couple of games for Sasha
and Malia. And for the first time in several years, I was able to pick out a card to give to
Barack on our anniversary. I went home elated. Sometimes, the things
smallest felt huge. As time went by, I added new adventures
to my routine. I started to meet friends occasionally in
out for dinner restaurants or at their homes. Sometimes I’d go to a park and take long
walks along the Potomac River. I’d have agents walking ahead of and me
behind on these excursions, but inconspicuously and at a distance. In later years, I’d begin leaving the to
White House hit workout classes, dropping in on SoulCycle and Solidcore
studios around the city, slipping into the room at the last minute
and leaving as soon as class was done to avoid causing a disturbance. The most
liberating activity of all turned out to be downhill skiing, a sport with which I had little a
experience but that quickly became passion. Capitalizing on the unusually heavy we’d
winters had during our first two years in Washington, I made a few day trips with the girls and
some friends to a tiny, aptly named ski area called Liberty
Mountain, near Gettysburg, where we found we could
don helmets, scarves, and goggles and blend into any
crowd. Gliding down a ski slope, I was outdoors, in motion, and unrecognized all at once. For me, it was like flying. The blending mattered. The blending, in
fact, was everything a way to feel like myself, to remain Michelle Robinson from the Side
South inside this larger sweep of history. I knit my old life into my new one, my private concerns into my public work. In D.C., I’d made a handful of new a of
friends couple the mothers of Sasha’s and Malia’s classmates and a few people
I’d met in the course of White House duties. These were women who cared less about my
last name or home address and more about who I was as a person. It’s funny how quickly you can tell who’s
there for you and who’s just trying to plant some sort of flag. Barack and I it
sometimes talked about with Sasha and Malia over dinner, the fact that there were
people, children and adults, who hovered at the a
edges of our friend groups seeming little too eager “thirsty,” as we called it. I’d learned many years earlier to hold my
true friends close. I was still deeply connected to the group
of women who had started gathering for Saturday playdates years earlier, back in our days
diaper-bag in Chicago, when our children blithely pitched food
from their high chairs and all of us were so tired we wanted to weep. These were the
friends who’d held me together, dropping off groceries when I was too to
busy shop, picking up the girls for ballet when I on
was behind work or just needing a break. A number of them had hopped planes
to join me for unglamorous stops on the campaign trail, giving me emotional when
ballast I needed it most. Friendships between women, as any woman
will tell you, are built of a thousand small kindnesses
like these, swapped back and forth and over again. In 2011, I started making a deliberate to
effort invest and reinvest in my friendships, bringing together old friends and new. Every few months, I invited twelve or so
of my closest friends to join me for a weekend at Camp David, the woodsy, summer- camp- like presidential retreat
that sits about sixty miles outside Washington in the mountains of northern Maryland. I started referring to
these gatherings as “Boot Camp,” in part because I did admittedly force to
everyone work out with me several times a day (I also at one point tried to ban and
wine snacks, though this got swiftly shot down) but I
more importantly because like the idea of being rigorous about friendship. My friends to
tend be accomplished, overcommitted people, many of them with
busy family lives and heavy-duty jobs. I understood it wasn’t always easy for to
them get away. But this was part of the point. We were all so used to sacrificing for
our kids, our spouses, and our work. I had learned
through my years of trying to find balance in my life that it was okay to flip those
priorities and care only for ourselves once in a while. I was more than happy to
wave this banner on behalf of my friends, to create the reason and the
power of a tradition for a whole bunch of women to turn to kids, spouses, and colleagues and say, Sorry, folks, I’m doing this for me. Boot Camp weekends became a way for us to
take shelter, connect, and recharge. We stayed in cozy, wood- paneled cabins surrounded by forest, buzzed around in golf carts, and rode
bikes. We played dodgeball and did burpees and
downward dogs. I sometimes invited a few young staffers
along, and it was trippy over the years to see
Susan Sher, in her late sixties, spider crawling the
across floor next to MacKenzie Smith, my twentysomething scheduler who’d been a
collegiate soccer player. We ate healthy meals cooked by the White
House chefs. We ran through drills overseen by my
trainer, Cornell, and several baby-faced naval who
staffers called us all “ma’am.” We got a lot of exercise and talked and
talked and talked. We pooled our thoughts and experiences, offering advice or funny stories or just
sometimes the assurance that whoever was spilling her guts in a given moment wasn’t the only one to
ever have a teenager who was acting out or a boss she couldn’t stand. Often, we steadied one another just by
listening. And saying good-bye at the end of each
weekend, we vowed we’d do it all again soon. My friends made me whole, as they always
have and always will. They gave me a lift anytime I felt down
or frustrated or had less access to Barack. They grounded me when I felt the
pressures of being judged, having everything from my choice of nail-
polish color to the size of my hips dissected and discussed publicly. And they helped
me ride out the big, unsettling waves that sometimes hit
without notice. On the first Sunday in May 2011, I went to dinner with two friends at a
restaurant downtown, leaving Barack and my mother in charge of
the girls at home. The weekend had seemed especially busy. Barack had been pulled into a flurry of
briefings that afternoon, and we’d spent Saturday evening at the
White House Correspondents’ Dinner, where in his speech Barack made a few
pointed jokes about Donald Trump’s Celebrity Apprentice career and his birther theories. I couldn’t see
him from my seat, but Trump had been in attendance. During Barack’s monologue, news cameras
zeroed in on him, stone- faced and stewing. For us, Sunday nights tended to be quiet and free. The girls were usually tired after a of
weekend sports and socializing. And Barack, if he was lucky, could sometimes squeeze in a daytime of
round golf on the course at Andrews Air Force Base, which left him more relaxed. That night, after catching up with my
friends, I arrived home around 10:00, greeted at
the door by an usher, as I always was. Already, I could tell
something was going on, sensing a different- from- normal level
of activity on the ground floor of the White House. I asked the usher if he knew where the
president was. “I believe he’s upstairs, ma’am,” he said, “getting ready to address the nation.” This is how I realized that it had
finally happened. I knew it was coming, but I hadn’t known
exactly how it would play out. I’d spent the last two days trying to act
completely normal, pretending I didn’t know that something
dangerous and important was about to take place. After months of high-level intelligence
gathering and weeks of meticulous preparation, after security briefings and risk and a
assessments final tense decision, seven thousand miles from the White House
and under cover of darkness, an elite team of U.S. Navy SEALs had a in
stormed mysterious compound Abbottabad, Pakistan, looking for Osama bin Laden. Barack was coming out of our bedroom as I
walked down the hall in the residence. He was dressed in a suit and red tie and
seemed thoroughly jacked up on adrenaline. He’d been carrying the pressure of this
decision for months. “We got him,” he said. “And no one got
hurt.” We hugged. Osama bin Laden had been
killed. No American lives had been lost. Barack had taken an enormous risk one him
that could have cost his presidency and it had all gone okay. The news was already
traveling across the world. People were clogging the streets around
the White House, spilling out of restaurants, hotels, and
apartment buildings, filling the night air with celebratory
shouts. The sound of it grew so loud and jubilant
it roused Malia from sleep in her bedroom, audible even through the glass
ballistic windows meant to shut everything out. That night, there was no inside or
outside, anyway. In cities across the country, people had taken to the streets, clearly drawn by an impulse to be close
to others, linked not just by patriotism but by the
communal grief that had been born on 9/11 and the years of worries that we’d be
attacked again. I thought about every military base I’d
ever visited, all those soldiers working to recover
from their wounds, the many people who’d sent family members
to a faraway place in the name of protecting our country, the thousands of children a
who’d lost parent on that horrible, sad day. There was no restoring any one
of those losses, I knew. Nobody’s death would ever replace
a life. I’m not sure anyone’s death is reason to
celebrate, ever. But what America got that night was
a moment of release, a chance to feel its own resilience. CHAPTER 23 Time seemed to loop and leap, making it feel impossible to measure or
track. Each day was packed. Each week and month
and year we spent in the White House was packed. I’d get to Friday and need to
work to remember how Monday and Tuesday had gone. I’d sit down to dinner and and
sometimes wonder where how lunch had happened. Even now, I still find it hard to process. The velocity was too great, the time for
reflection too limited. A single afternoon could hold a couple of
official events, several meetings, and a photo shoot. I might visit several states in a day, or speak to twelve thousand people, or have four hundred kids over to do with
jumping jacks me on the South Lawn, all before putting on a fancy dress for
an evening reception. I used my down days, those free from
official business, to tend to Sasha and Malia and their
lives, before going back “up” again back into
hair, makeup, and wardrobe. Back into the of
vortex the public eye. As we moved toward Barack’s reelection in
year 2012, I felt that I couldn’t and shouldn’t rest. I was still earning my grace. I thought often of what I owed and to
whom. I carried a history with me, and it wasn’t that of presidents or First
Ladies. I’d never related to the story of John I
Quincy Adams the way did to that of Sojourner Truth, or been moved by the
Woodrow Wilson way I was by Harriet Tubman. The struggles of Rosa Parks and Coretta
Scott King were more familiar to me than those of Eleanor Roosevelt or Mamie Eisenhower. I carried their histories, along with of
those my mother and grandmothers. None of these women could ever have a the
imagined life like one I now had, but they’d trusted that their would yield
perseverance something better, eventually, for someone like me. I wanted
to show up in the world in a way that honored who they were. I put this on
myself as pressure, a driving need not to screw anything up. Though I was thought of as a popular
First Lady, I couldn’t help but feel haunted by the
ways I’d been criticized, by the people who’d made assumptions me
about based on the color of my skin. To this end, I rehearsed my speeches and
again again using a teleprompter set up in one corner of my office. I pushed hard on
my schedulers and advance teams to make sure every one of our events ran smoothly
and on time. I pushed even harder on my policy to the
advisers continue growing reach of Let’s Move! and Joining Forces. I was focused on not
wasting any of the opportunities I now had, but sometimes I had to remind myself just
to breathe. Barack and I both knew that the months of
campaigning ahead would involve extra travel, extra strategizing, and extra worry. It
was impossible not to worry about reelection. The cost was huge. (Barack and Mitt
Romney, the former Massachusetts governor who the
would eventually become Republican nominee, would each raise over a billion dollars
in the end to keep their campaigns competitive.) And the responsibility was also huge. The the
election would determine everything from fate of the new health- care law to whether America would
be part of the global effort to combat climate change. Everyone working in the White in
House lived the limbo of not knowing whether we’d get a second term. I tried not to even
consider the possibility that Barack might lose the election, but it was there a kernel I
of fear he and carried privately, neither of us daring to give it voice. The summer of 2011 turned out to be for
especially bruising Barack. A group of obstinate congressional to the
Republicans refused authorize issuing of new government bonds a relatively routine process known as the a
raising debt ceiling unless he made series of painful cuts to government programs like Social
Security, Medicaid, and Medicare, which he opposed
because they would hurt the people who were struggling the most. Meanwhile, the monthly jobs reports
published by the Labor Department were showing consistent but sluggish growth, suggesting that when it came to
recovering from the 2008 crisis, the nation still wasn’t where it needed
to be. Many people blamed Barack. In the relief
following the death of Osama bin Laden, his approval ratings had spiked, hitting
a two-year high, but then, just a few months later, following the debt- ceiling brawl and a
worries about new recession, they’d plunged to the lowest they’d been. As this tumult was beginning, I flew to a
South Africa for goodwill visit that had been planned months in advance. Sasha and
Malia’s school year had just ended, so they were able to join me, along with my mother and Craig’s kids and
Leslie Avery, who were now teenagers. I was headed to a
there give keynote address at a U.S.-sponsored forum for young African women leaders the
from around continent, but we’d also filled my schedule with to
community events connected wellness and education, as well as visits with local leaders and
U.S. consulate workers. We’d finish with a to
short visit Botswana, meeting with its president and stopping a
at community HIV clinic, and then enjoy a quick safari before
heading home. It had taken no time at all for us to get
swept up in South Africa’s energy. In Johannesburg, we toured the
Apartheid Museum and danced and read books with young children at a community center in one of the black
townships north of the city. At a soccer stadium in Cape Town, we met community organizers and health to
workers who were using youth sports programs help educate children about HIV/AIDS, and were to
introduced Archbishop Desmond Tutu, the legendary theologian and activist in
who’d helped dismantle apartheid South Africa. Tutu was seventy- nine years old, a barrel- chested man with bright eyes an
and irrepressible laugh. Hearing that I was at the stadium to
promote fitness, he insisted on doing push-ups with me in
front of a cheering pack of kids. Over the course of those few days in
South Africa, I felt myself floating. This visit was a
long way from my first trip to Kenya in 1991, when I’d ridden around with in
Barack matatus and pushed Auma’s broken- down VW along the side of a dusty road. What I felt was one part jet lag, maybe, but two parts something more and
profound elating. It was as if we’d stepped into the larger
crosscurrents of culture and history, reminded suddenly of our relative in the
smallness wider arc of time. Seeing the faces of the seventy- six been
young women who’d chosen to attend the leadership forum because they were doing meaningful
work in their communities, I fought back tears. They gave me hope. They made me feel old in the best way.
possible A full 60 percent of Africa’s population
at the time was under the age of twenty- five. Here were women, all of them under
thirty and some as young as sixteen, who were building nonprofits, training to
other women be entrepreneurs, and risking imprisonment to report on
government corruption. And now they were being connected, trained, and encouraged. I hoped this
would only amplify their might. The most surreal moment of all, though, had come early, on just the day
second of our trip. My family and I had been at the Nelson in
Mandela Foundation headquarters Johannesburg, visiting with Graça Machel, a well-known
humanitarian and Mandela’s wife, when we received word that Mandela would
himself be happy to greet us at his home nearby. We went immediately, of course. Nelson Mandela was ninety-two at the time. He’d been hospitalized with lung issues
earlier in the year. I was told he seldom received guests. Barack had met him six years earlier, as a senator, when Mandela had visited
Washington. He’d kept a framed photo of their meeting
on the wall of his office ever since. Even my kids Sasha, ten, and Malia, about to turn thirteen understood what a
big deal this was. Even my eternally unfazed mother looked a
little stunned. There was no one alive who’d had a more
meaningful impact on the world than Nelson Mandela had, at least by my measure. He’d been a young man in the 1940s when
he first joined the African National Congress and began boldly challenging the South
all-white African government and its entrenched racist policies. He’d been forty-four years old when he in
was put shackles and sent to prison for his activism, and seventy- one when he in
was finally released 1990. Surviving twenty- seven years of and as a
deprivation isolation prisoner, having had many of his friends tortured
and killed under the apartheid regime, Mandela managed to negotiate rather than
fight with government leaders, brokering a miraculously peaceful to a in
transition true democracy South Africa and ultimately becoming its first president. Mandela lived on a leafy
suburban street in a Mediterranean- style home set behind butter- colored concrete walls. Graça us
Machel ushered through a courtyard shaded by trees and into the house, where in a wide, sunlit room her husband sat in an
armchair. He had sparse, snowy hair and wore a
brown batik shirt. Someone had laid a white blanket across
his lap. He was surrounded by several generations
of relatives, all of whom welcomed us enthusiastically. Something in the brightness of the room, the volubility of the family, and the of
squinty smile the patriarch reminded me of going to my grandfather Southside’s house when
I was a kid. I’d been nervous to come, but now I
relaxed. The truth is I’m not sure that the who we
patriarch himself completely grasped were or why we’d stopped in. He was an old man at
this point, his attention seeming to drift, his a
hearing little weak. “This is Michelle Obama!” Graça Machel
said, leaning close to his ear. “The wife of
the U.S. president!” “Oh, lovely,” murmured Nelson
Mandela. “Lovely.” He looked at me with genuine
interest, though in truth I could have been anyone. It seemed clear that he bestowed this of
same degree warmth upon every person who crossed his path. My interaction with Mandela was
both quiet and profound maybe more profound, even, for its quietness. His life’s words
had mostly been spoken now, his speeches and letters, his books and
protest chants, already etched not just into his story as
but into humanity’s a whole. I could feel all of it in the brief I had
moment with him the dignity and spirit that had coaxed equality from
a place where none had existed. I was still thinking about Mandela five
days later as we flew back to the United States, traveling north and west over and
Africa then across the Atlantic over the course of a long dark night. Sasha and Malia lay to
sprawled beneath blankets next their cousins; my mother dozed in a seat nearby. Farther back in the plane, staff and were
Secret Service members watching movies and catching up on sleep. The engines hummed. I felt and
alone not alone. We were headed home home being the city
strange- familiar of Washington, D.C., with its white marble and clashing
ideologies, with everything that still needed to be
fought and won. I thought about the young African women
I’d met at the leadership forum, all of them now headed back to their own
communities to pick up their work again, persevering through whatever tumult they
faced. Mandela had gone to jail for his
principles. He’d missed seeing his kids grow up, and then he’d missed seeing many of his
grandkids grow up, too. All this without bitterness. All the
this still believing that better nature of his country would at some point prevail. He’d worked
and waited, tolerant and undiscouraged, to see it
happen. I flew home propelled by that spirit. Life was teaching me that progress and
change happen slowly. Not in two years, four years, or even a lifetime. We were planting of
seeds change, the fruit of which we might never see. We had to be patient. *** Three times the
over course of the fall of 2011, Barack proposed bills that would create
thousands of jobs for Americans, in part by giving states money to hire
more teachers and first responders. Three times the Republicans blocked them, never even allowing a vote. “The single
most important thing we want to achieve,” the Senate minority leader, Mitch
McConnell, had declared to a reporter a year earlier, laying out his party’s goals, “is for to
President Obama be a one-term president.” It was that simple. The Republican was to
Congress devoted Barack’s failure above all else. It seemed they weren’t prioritizing the
governance of the country or the fact that people needed jobs. Their own power came first. I found it demoralizing, infuriating,
sometimes crushing. This was politics, yes, but in its most
fractious and cynical form, seemingly disconnected from any larger of
sense purpose. I felt emotions that perhaps Barack to
couldn’t afford feel. He stayed locked in his work, for the most part undaunted, riding out
the bumps and compromising where he could, clinging to the sober- minded, someone’s-
gotta- take- this- on brand of optimism that had always guided him. He’d been in politics for
fifteen years now. I continued to think of him as being like
an old copper pot seasoned by fire, dinged up but still shiny. Returning to I
the campaign trail as Barack and began to do in the fall of 2011 became something a
of salve. It took us out of Washington and returned
us to communities all around the country again, places like Richmond and Reno, where we
could hug and shake hands with supporters, listening to their ideas and concerns. It was a chance to feel the grassroots so
energy that has always been central to Barack’s vision of democracy, and to be
reminded that American citizens are for the most part far less cynical than their elected
leaders. We just needed them to get out and vote. I’d been disappointed that millions of
people had sat out during the 2010 midterm elections, effectively handing Barack a divided that
Congress could barely manage to make a law. Despite the challenges, there was plenty
to feel hopeful about, too. By the end of 2011, the last American soldiers had left Iraq;
a gradual drawdown of troops was under way in Afghanistan. Major provisions of the Care
Affordable Act had also gone into effect, with young people allowed to remain on
longer their parents’ insurance policies and companies prevented from capping a patient’s lifetime coverage.
All this was forward motion, I reminded myself, steps taken along the
broader path. Even with an entire political party to
conspiring see Barack fail, we had no choice but to stay positive and
carry on. It was similar to when the Sidwell mom if
had asked Malia she feared for her life at tennis practice. What can you do, really, but go out and hit another ball?
So we worked. Both of us worked. I threw myself into my
initiatives. Under the banner of Let’s Move! we to up
continued rack results. My team and I persuaded Darden
Restaurants, the parent company behind chains like and
Olive Garden Red Lobster, to make changes to the kinds of food it
offered and how it was prepared. They pledged to revamp their menus, cutting calories, reducing sodium, and
offering healthier options for kids’ meals. We’d appealed to the company’s executives
to their conscience as well as their bottom line convincing them that the culture of eating in was it
America shifting and made good business sense to get out ahead of the curve. Darden served 400 million meals to each
Americans year. At that scale, even a small shift like of
removing tantalizing photos cool, icy glasses of soda from the kids’ menus
could have a real impact. A First Lady’s power is a curious thing
as soft and undefined as the role itself. And yet I was learning to harness it. I had no executive authority. I didn’t or
command troops engage in formal diplomacy. Tradition called for me to provide a kind
of gentle light, flattering the president with my devotion, flattering the nation primarily by not
challenging it. I was beginning to see, though, that wielded carefully the light was more
powerful than that. I had influence in the form of being of a
something curiosity a black First Lady, a professional woman, a mother of young
kids. People seemed to want to dial into my
clothes, my shoes, and my hairstyles, but they had
also to see me in the context of where I was and why. I was learning how
to connect my message to my image, and in this way I could direct the gaze.
American I could put on an interesting outfit, crack a joke, and talk about sodium in
content kids’ meals without being totally boring. I could publicly applaud a company that
was actively hiring members of the military community, or drop to the floor for an on-air with
push-up contest Ellen DeGeneres (and win it, earning gloating rights forever) in the I
name of Let’s Move! was a child of the mainstream, and this was an asset. Barack sometimes referred to me as “Joe
Public,” asking me to weigh in on campaign slogans
and strategies, knowing that I kept myself happily in
steeped popular culture. Though I’d moved through rarefied places
like Princeton and Sidley & Austin, and though I now occasionally found and a
myself wearing diamonds ball gown, I’d never stopped reading People magazine
or let go of my love of a good sitcom. I watched Oprah and Ellen far more often
than I’d ever tuned in to Meet the Press or Face the Nation, and to this day
nothing pleases me more than the tidy triumph delivered by a home- makeover
show. All of this is to say that I saw ways to
connect with Americans that Barack and his West Wing advisers didn’t fully
recognize, at least initially. Rather than doing big
interviews with newspapers or cable news outlets, I began sitting down with influential
“mommy bloggers” who reached an enormous and dialed-in of
audience women. Watching my young staffers interact with
their phones, seeing Malia and Sasha start to take in
news and chat with their high school friends via social media, I realized there was to
opportunity be tapped there as well. I crafted my first tweet in the fall of
2011 to promote Joining Forces and then watched it zing through the strange, boundless ether where people increasingly
spent their time. It was a revelation. All of it was a
revelation. With my soft power, I was finding I could
be strong. If reporters and television cameras to
wanted follow me, then I was going to take them places. They could come watch me and Jill Biden a
paint wall, for example, at a nondescript row house
in the Northwest part of Washington. There was nothing inherently interesting
about two ladies with paint rollers, but it baited a certain hook. It brought everyone to the doorstep of
Sergeant Johnny Agbi, who’d been twenty- five years old and a
medic in Afghanistan when his transport helicopter was attacked, shattering his spine, injuring
his brain, and requiring a long rehabilitation at
Walter Reed. His first floor was now being retrofitted
to accommodate his wheelchair its doorways widened, its kitchen sink lowered part of a joint
effort between a nonprofit called Rebuilding Together and the company that owned Sears and Kmart. This was the thousandth such home they’d
renovated on behalf of veterans in need. The cameras caught all of it the soldier, his house, the goodwill and energy being
poured in. The reporters interviewed not just me and
Jill but Sergeant Agbi and the folks who’d done the real work. For me, this was how it
should be. The gaze belonged here. *** On Election
Day November 6, 2012 my fears sat with me quietly. Barack and the girls and I were back in
Chicago, at home on Greenwood Avenue, caught in of
the purgatory waiting for an entire nation to accept or reject us. This vote, for me, was more fraught than any other
we’d gone through. It felt like a referendum not only on and
Barack’s political performance the state of the country but also on his character, on our very presence in the White House. Our girls had established a strong for
community themselves, and a sense of normalcy that I didn’t to
want upend yet again. I was so invested now, having given over
four years of our family’s life, that it was impossible not to feel a bit
everything personally. The campaign had worn us out, maybe even more than I’d anticipated. While working on my initiatives and up
keeping with things like parent- teacher conferences and monitoring the girls’ homework, I’d been speaking at
campaign events at an average of three cities a day, three days a week. And Barack’s pace
had been even more grueling. Polls consistently showed him with only a
tenuous lead over Mitt Romney. Making matters worse, he’d bombed during
their first debate in October, triggering a wave of eleventh- hour among
anxiety donors and advisers. We could read the exhaustion on the faces
of our hardworking staffers. Though they aimed never to show it, they were surely unsettled by the that be
possibility Barack could forced out of office in a matter of months. Throughout it, Barack stayed calm, though I could see to
what the pressure did him. During the final weeks, he began to look
a little wan and even skinnier than usual, chewing his Nicorette with unusual vigor. I’d watched with wifely concern as he to
tried do everything soothe the worriers, finish out the campaign, and govern the
nation all at once, including responding to a terrorist on in
attack American diplomats Benghazi, Libya, and managing a massive federal to
response Hurricane Sandy, which tore up the Eastern Seaboard just a
week before the election. As polls on the East Coast began to close
that evening, I headed up to the third floor of our
house, where we’d set up a kind of de facto hair
and makeup salon to prepare for the public part of the night ahead. Meredith had steamed and readied clothes
for me, my mom, and the girls. Johnny and Carl my
were doing hair and makeup. In keeping with tradition, Barack had out
gone to play basketball earlier in the day and had since settled into his office to put
finishing touches on his remarks. We had a TV on the third floor, but I deliberately kept it off. If there was news, good or bad, I wanted to hear it directly from Barack
or Melissa, or someone else close to me. The babble of news anchors with their my
interactive electoral maps always jangled nerves. I didn’t want the details: I just wanted
to know how to feel. It was after 8:00 p.m. in the East now, which meant there had to be some early
results coming in. I picked up my BlackBerry and sent emails
to Valerie, Melissa, and Tina Tchen, who in 2011 had
become my new chief of staff, asking them what they knew. I waited
fifteen minutes, then thirty, but nobody responded. The me
room around began to feel strangely silent. My mother sat in the kitchen downstairs, reading a magazine. Meredith was getting
the girls ready for the evening. Johnny ran a flat iron over my hair. Was I being paranoid, or were people not
looking me in the eye? Did they somehow know something I didn’t? As more time
passed, my head started to throb. I felt my to
equilibrium beginning slip. I didn’t dare turn on the news, assuming suddenly that it was bad. I was accustomed at this point to off
fighting negative thoughts, sticking to the good until I was forced
absolutely to contend with something unpleasant. I kept my confidence in a little citadel, high on a hill inside my own heart. But for every minute my BlackBerry lay in
dormant my lap, I felt the walls starting to breach, the doubts beginning to rampage. Maybe we
hadn’t worked hard enough. Maybe we didn’t deserve another term. My hands had started to shake. I was just about ready to pass out from
the anxiety when Barack came trotting up the stairs, wearing his big old confident
grin. His worries were well behind him already. “We’re kicking butt,” he said, looking I
surprised that didn’t know it already. “It’s basically done.” It turned out that
downstairs, the mood had been jubilant all along, the basement TV pumping out a consistent
stream of good news. The problem for me was that the cell on
service my BlackBerry had somehow disconnected, never sending out my messages or updates
downloading from others. I’d allowed myself to get trapped in my
own head. Nobody had known I was worrying, not even the people in the room with me. Barack would win all but one of the that
battleground states night. He’d win among young people, minorities, and women, just as he had in 2008. Despite everything the Republicans had to
done try to thwart him, despite the many attempts to obstruct his
presidency, his vision had prevailed. We’d asked for
Americans permission to keep working to finish strong and now we’d gotten it. The relief was
immediate. Are we good enough? Yes we are. At some late hour, Mitt Romney called to
concede. Once again, we found ourselves dressed up
and waving from a stage, four Obamas and a lot of confetti, glad to have another four years. The certainty that came with reelection
held me steady. We had more time to further our aims. We could be more patient with our push
for progress. We had a sense of the future now, which made me happy. We could keep Sasha
and Malia enrolled at school; our staff could stay in their jobs; our ideas still
mattered. And when these next four years were over, we’d be truly done, which made me of all.
happiest No more campaigning, no more sweating out
strategy sessions or polls or debates or approval ratings, ever again. The end of our political life
was finally in sight. The truth is that the future would arrive
with its own surprises some joyous, some unspeakably tragic. Four more years
in the White House meant four more years of being out front as symbols, absorbing and to
responding whatever came our country’s way. Barack and I had campaigned on the idea
that we still had the energy and discipline for this sort of work, that we had the to
heart take it in. And now the future was coming in our
direction, maybe faster than we knew. *** Five weeks
later, a gunman walked into Sandy Hook School in
Elementary Newtown, Connecticut, and started killing I had a
children. just finished giving short speech across the street from the White House and was scheduled to
then go visit a children’s hospital when Tina pulled me aside to tell me what had
happened. While I’d been speaking, she and several
others had seen the headlines start to come up on their phones. They’d sat there trying
to hide their emotions as I wrapped up my remarks. The news Tina gave me was so and
horrifying sad I could barely process what she was saying. She mentioned she’d been
in touch with the West Wing. Barack was in the Oval Office by himself. “He’s asking for you to come,” she said. “Right away.” My husband needed
me. This would be the only time in eight that
years he’d request my presence in the middle of a workday, the two of us our to
rearranging schedules be alone together for a moment of dim comfort. Usually, work was work and home was home, but for us, as for many people, the tragedy in Newtown shattered every
window and blew down every fence. When I walked into the Oval Office, Barack and I embraced silently. There was
nothing to say. No words. What a lot of people don’t know
is that the president sees almost everything, or is at least privy to basically any to
available information related the country’s well-being. Being a fact guy, Barack always asked for
more rather than less. He tried to gather both the widest and of
the most close-up view every situation, even when it was bad, so that he could a
offer truly informed response. As he saw it, it was part of his
responsibility, what he’d been elected to do to look than
rather look away, to stay upright when the rest of us felt
ready to fall down. Which is to say that by the time I found
him, he’d been briefed in detail on the
graphic, horrid crime scene at Sandy Hook. He’d heard about blood pooled on the of
floors classrooms and the bodies of twenty first graders and six educators torn apart by a
semiautomatic rifle. His shock and grief would never compare
with that of the first responders who’d rushed in to secure the building and evacuate from
survivors the carnage. It was nothing next to that of the who an
parents endured interminable wait in the chilly air outside the building, praying
that they’d see their child’s face again. And it was nothing at all next to those
whose wait would be in vain. But still, those images were seared into
permanently his psyche. I could see in his eyes how broken they’d
left him, what this had done already to his faith. He started to describe it to me but then
stopped, realizing it was better to spare me the
extra pain. Like me, Barack loved children in a deep
and genuine way. Beyond being a doting father, he brought
regularly kids into the Oval Office to show them around. He asked to hold babies. He lit up anytime he got to visit a fair
school science or a youth sporting event. The previous winter, he’d added a
whole new level of delight to his existence when he started volunteering as an assistant
coach for the Vipers, Sasha’s middle school basketball team. of
The proximity children made everything lighter for him. He knew as well as anyone the promise
lost with those twenty young lives. Staying upright after Newtown was the had
probably hardest thing he’d ever to do. When Malia and Sasha came home from later
school that day, Barack and I met them in the residence
and hugged them tight, trying to mask the urgency of our need to
just touch them. It was hard to know what to say or not to
say our girls about the shooting. Parents all around the country, we knew, were grappling with the same
thing. Later that day, Barack held a press
conference downstairs, trying to put together words that might
add up to something like solace. He wiped away tears as news cameras him,
clicked furiously around understanding that truly there was no to
solace be had. The best he could do was to offer his he
resolve something assumed would also get taken up by citizens and lawmakers around
the country to prevent more massacres by passing basic, sensible laws concerning how guns were
sold. I watched him step forward, knowing that
I myself wasn’t ready. In nearly four years as First Lady, I had consoled often. I’d prayed with had
people whose homes been shredded by a tornado in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, huge swaths of to
the town turned matchsticks in an instant. I’d put my arms around men, women, and children who’d lost loved ones
to war in Afghanistan, to an extremist who’d shot up an Army in
base Texas, and to violence on street corners near
their own homes. In the previous four months, I’d paid to
visits people who’d survived mass shootings at a movie theater in Colorado and inside a in
Sikh temple Wisconsin. It was devastating, every time. I’d tried
always to bring the most calm and open part of myself to these meetings, to lend my
own strength by being caring and present, sitting quietly on the riverbed of other
people’s pain. But two days after the shooting at Sandy
Hook, when Barack traveled to Newtown to speak
at a prayer vigil being held for the victims, I couldn’t bring myself to join him. I was so shaken by it that I had no to
strength available lend. I’d been First Lady for almost four years, and there had been too much killing too
already many senseless preventable deaths and too little action. I wasn’t sure what comfort I ever
could give to someone whose six- year- old had been gunned down at school. Instead, like a lot of parents, I clung to my children, my fear and love
intertwined. It was nearly Christmas, and Sasha was a
among group of local children selected to join the Moscow Ballet for two performances of
The Nutcracker, both happening on the same day as the in
vigil Newtown. Barack managed to slip into a back row
and watch the dress rehearsal before leaving for Connecticut. I went to the evening show. The ballet was as beautiful and as any of
otherworldly recounting that story ever is, with its prince in a moonlit forest and
its swirling pageantry of sweets. Sasha played a mouse, dressed in a black
leotard with fuzzy ears and a tail, performing her part while an ornate the
sleigh drifted through swelling orchestral music and showers of glittering fake snow. My eyes never left
her. My whole being was grateful for her. Sasha stood bright- eyed onstage, looking
at first like she couldn’t believe where she was, as if she found the whole scene dazzling
and unreal. Which of course it was. But she was young
enough still that she could give herself over to it, at least for the moment, allowing herself to move through this and
heaven where nobody spoke everyone danced, and a holiday was always just about to
arrive. *** Bear with me here, because this get
doesn’t necessarily easier. It would be one thing if America were a a
simple place with simple story. If I could narrate my part in it only the
through lens of what was orderly and sweet. If there were no steps
backward. And if every sadness, when it came, turned out at least to be redemptive in
the end. But that’s not America, and it’s not me, either. I’m not going to try to bend this
into any kind of perfect shape. Barack’s second term would prove to be in
easier many ways than his first. We’d learned so much in four years, putting the right people into place us,
around building systems that generally worked.
We knew enough now to avoid some of the inefficiencies and small mistakes that had been made the
first time around, beginning on Inauguration Day in January
2013, when I requested that the viewing stand
for the parade be fully heated this time so our feet wouldn’t freeze. In an attempt
to conserve our energy, we hosted only two inaugural balls that
night, as opposed to the ten we’d gone to in
2009. We had four years still to go, and if I’d learned anything, it was to to
relax and try pace myself. Sitting next to Barack at the parade he’d
after renewed his vows to the country, I watched the flow of floats and the in
marching bands moving and out of snappy formation, already able to savor more I
than had our first time around. From my vantage point, I could barely out
make the individual faces of the performers. There were thousands of them, each with
his or her own story. Thousands of others had come to D.C. to perform in the many other events being
held in the days leading up to the inauguration, and tens of thousands more
had come to watch. Later, I’d wish almost frantically that
I’d been able to catch sight of one person in particular, a willowy black girl wearing
a sparkling gold headband and a blue majorette’s uniform who’d come with the King College Prep marching
band from the South Side of Chicago to perform at some of the side events. I wanted to believe that I somehow would
have had the occasion to see her inside the great wash of people flowing through
the city over those days Hadiya Pendleton, a girl in ascent, fifteen years old and a
having big moment, having ridden a bus all the way to with
Washington her bandmates. At home in Chicago, Hadiya lived with her
parents and her little brother, about two miles from our house on Avenue.
Greenwood She was an honor student at school who to
liked tell people she wanted to go to Harvard someday. She’d begun planning
her sweet- sixteen birthday party. She loved Chinese food and cheeseburgers
and going for ice cream with friends. I learned these things several weeks
later, at her funeral. Eight days after the
inauguration, Hadiya Pendleton was shot and killed in a
public park in Chicago, not far from her school. She and a group
of friends had been standing under a metal shelter next to a playground, waiting for a rainstorm to pass. They’d been mistaken for gang members, sprayed with bullets by an eighteen- old
year- belonging to a different gang. Hadiya had been hit in the back as she to
tried run for cover. Two of her friends were injured. All this at 2:20 on a Tuesday afternoon. I wish I’d seen her alive, if only to have a memory to share with
her mom, now that the memories of her daughter
were suddenly finite, things to be collected and hung on to. I went to Hadiya’s funeral because it the
felt like right thing to do. I’d stayed back when Barack went to the
Newtown memorial, but now was my time to step up. My hope was that my presence would help
turn the gaze toward the many innocent kids being gunned down in city streets almost
every day and that this, coupled with the horror of Newtown, would help prompt Americans to demand gun
reasonable laws. Hadiya Pendleton came from a close-knit, working- class South Side family, much my
like own. Put simply, I could have known her. I could have been her once, even. And had she taken a different route
home from school that day, or even moved six inches left instead of
six inches right when the gunfire started, she could have been me. “I did everything
I was supposed to,” her mother told me when we met just the
before funeral started, her brown eyes leaking tears. Cleopatra a
Cowley- Pendleton was warm woman with a soft voice and close- cropped hair who worked in at
customer service a credit rating company. On the day of her daughter’s funeral, she wore a giant pink flower pinned to
her lapel. She and her husband, Nathaniel, had over
watched Hadiya carefully, encouraging her to apply to King, a selective public high school, and sure
making she had little time to be out on the streets, signing her up for
volleyball, cheerleading, and a dance ministry at
church. As my parents had once done for me, they’d made sacrifices so that she could
be exposed to things outside her neighborhood. She was to have gone to Europe with the
marching band that spring, and she’d apparently loved her visit to
Washington. “It’s so clean there, Mom,” she’d to
reported Cleopatra after returning. “I think I’m going to go into politics.” Instead, Hadiya Pendleton became one of
three people who died in separate incidents of gun violence in Chicago on that one January day. She was the thirty- sixth person in in
Chicago killed gun violence that year, and the year was at that point just nine
twenty- days old. It goes without saying that nearly all
those victims were black. For all her hopes and hard work, Hadiya became a symbol of the wrong thing. Her funeral was filled with people, another broken community jammed into a
church, this one working to handle the sight of a
teenage girl in a casket lined with purple silk. Cleopatra stood up and spoke
about her daughter. Hadiya’s friends stood up and told about
stories her, each one punctuated by a larger feeling
of outrage and helplessness. These were children, asking not just why
but why so often? There were powerful adults in the room that day not only me, but the mayor of the city, the governor of the state, Jesse Jackson
Sr., and Valerie Jarrett, among others all of
us packed into pews, left to reckon privately with our grief
and guilt as the choir sang with such force that it shook the floor of the church. *** It was important to me to be more a
than consoler. In my life, I’d heard plenty of empty
words coming from important people, lip service paid during times of crisis
with no action to follow. I was determined to be someone who told
the truth, using my voice to lift up the voiceless I
when could, and to not disappear on people in need. I understood that when I showed up
somewhere, it appeared dramatic from the outside a
sudden and swift- descending storm kicked up by the motorcade, the agents, the aides, and the
media, with me at the center. We were there and
then gone. I didn’t like what this did to my
interactions, the way my presence sometimes caused to
people stammer or go silent, unsure of how to be themselves. It’s why I often tried to introduce with
myself a hug, to slow down the moment and shuck some of
the pretense, landing us all in the flesh. I tried to build relationships with the I
people met, especially those who didn’t normally have
access to the world I now inhabited. I wanted to share the brightness as I
could. I invited Hadiya Pendleton’s parents to
sit next to me at Barack’s State of the Union speech a few days after the funeral and
then hosted the family at the White House for the Easter Egg Roll. Cleopatra, who became a vocal advocate for violence
prevention, also returned a couple of times to attend
different meetings on the issue. I made a point of writing letters to the
girls from the Elizabeth Garrett Anderson School in London who had so profoundly moved me, encouraging them to stay hopeful and keep
working, despite their lack of privilege. In 2011, I’d taken a group of thirty- seven girls
from the school to visit the University of Oxford, bringing not the high achievers
but students whose teachers thought they weren’t yet reaching their potential. The idea was to give them a of
glimpse what was possible, to show them what a reach could yield. In 2012, I’d hosted students from the at
school the White House during the British prime minister’s state visit. I felt it was to
important reach out to kids multiple times and in multiple ways in order for them to it
feel that was all real. My early successes in life were, I knew, a product of the consistent love
and high expectations with which I was surrounded as a child, both at home and at school. It was this insight that drove my White
House mentoring program, and it lay at the center of a new my and
education initiative staff I were now preparing to launch, called Reach
Higher. I wanted to encourage kids to strive to
get to college and, once there, to stick with it. I knew that in the coming years, a college education would only become for
more essential young people entering a global job market. Reach Higher would seek to help them the
along way, providing more support for school and to
counselors easier access federal financial aid. I’d been lucky to have parents, teachers, and mentors who’d fed me with a
consistent, simple message: You matter. As an adult, I wanted to pass those words to a new
generation. It was the message I gave my own
daughters, who were fortunate to have it reinforced
daily by their school and their privileged circumstances, and I was determined to express some of I
version it to every young person encountered. I wanted to be the opposite of the I’d in
guidance counselor had high school, who’d blithely told me I wasn’t Princeton
material. “All of us believe you belong here,” I’d said to the Elizabeth Garrett girls
Anderson as they sat, many of them looking a little awestruck, in the Gothic old-world dining hall at
Oxford, surrounded by university professors and
students who’d come out for the day to mentor them. I said something similar anytime we had
kids visit the White House teens we invited from the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation; from
children local schools who showed up to work in the garden; high schoolers who came for our
career days and workshops in fashion, music, and poetry; even kids I only got a
to give quick but emphatic hug to in a rope line. The message was always
the same. You belong. You matter. I think highly of
you. An economist from a British university a
would later put out study that looked at the test performances of Elizabeth Garrett
Anderson students, finding that their overall scores jumped
significantly after I’d started connecting with them the equivalent of moving from a C average to an A. Any credit for improvement really to the
belonged girls, their teachers, and the daily work they
did together, but it also affirmed the idea that kids
will invest more when they feel they’re being invested in. I understood that there was
power in showing children my regard. *** Two months after Hadiya Pendleton’s
funeral, I returned to Chicago. I’d directed Tina, my chief of staff and an attorney who had
herself spent many years in the city, to throw her energy into rallying support
for violence prevention there. Tina was a bighearted policy wonk with an
infectious laugh and more hustle than just about anyone I knew. She understood which to to
levers pull inside and outside government make an impact at the scale I envisioned. Moreover, her nature and experience allow
wouldn’t her voice to go unheard, especially at tables dominated by men, where she often found herself. Throughout
Barack’s second term, she would wrestle with the Pentagon and
various state governors to clear away red tape so that veterans and military spouses could
more efficiently build their careers, and she’d also help engineer a mammoth on
new administration- wide effort centered girls’ education worldwide. In the wake of Hadiya’s death, Tina had leveraged her local contacts, encouraging Chicago business leaders and
philanthropists to work with Mayor Rahm Emanuel to expand community programs for at-risk youth across the city. Her efforts had helped yield $33 million
in pledges in just a matter of weeks. On a cool day in April, Tina and I flew out to attend a meeting
of community leaders discussing youth empowerment, and also to meet a new group of kids. Earlier that winter, the public radio had
program This American Life devoted two hours to telling the stories of students and staff from R.
William Harper Senior High School in Englewood, a neighborhood on the South Side. In the previous year, twenty- nine of the
school’s current and recent students had been shot, eight of them fatally. These numbers were
astonishing to me and my staff, but the sad fact is that urban schools
around the country were contending with epidemic levels of gun violence. Amid all the talk of
youth empowerment, it seemed important to actually sit down
and hear from the youth. When I was young, Englewood had been a as
rough neighborhood but not necessarily deadly as it was now. In junior high, I’d traveled to Englewood for weekly labs
biology at a community college there. Now, years later, as my motorcade made of
its way past strips neglected bungalows and shuttered storefronts, past vacant lots and
burned-out buildings, it looked to me as if the only thriving
businesses left were the liquor stores. I thought back to my own childhood and my
own neighborhood, and how the word “ghetto” got thrown like
around a threat. The mere suggestion of it, I understood
now, caused stable, middle- class families to
bail preemptively for the suburbs, worried their property values would drop. “Ghetto” signaled that a place was both
black and hopeless. It was a label that foretold failure and
then hastened its arrival. It closed corner groceries and gas and to
stations undermined schools and educators trying instill self-worth in neighborhood kids. It was a word tried
everyone to run from, but it could rear up on a community quick. In the middle of West Englewood sat High
Harper School, a large sand-brick building with multiple
wings. I met the school’s principal, Leonetta
Sanders, a quick- moving African American woman at
who’d been the school for six years, and two school social workers who in the
immersed themselves lives of the 510 kids enrolled at Harper, most of them from low-income
families. One of the social workers, Crystal Smith, could often be found pacing Harper’s
hallways between classes, peppering students with positivity, her
communicating high regard for them by calling out, “I’m so proud of you!” and “I see you
trying hard!” She’d shout, “I appreciate you in
advance!” for every good choice she trusted those
students would make. In the school library that day, I joined a circle of twenty-two Harper
students all African American, mostly juniors and seniors who were in on
seated chairs and couches, dressed in khakis and collared shirts. Most were eager to talk. They described a
daily, even hourly, fear of gangs and violence. Some explained that they had absent or a
addicted parents; couple had spent time in juvenile detention centers. A junior named Thomas
had witnessed a good friend a sixteen- year- old girl get shot and killed the previous summer. He’d also been there when his older
brother, who had been partially paralyzed due to a
gunshot injury, was shot and wounded in the same incident
while sitting outside in his wheelchair. Nearly every kid there that day had lost
someone a friend, relative, neighbor to a bullet. Few, meanwhile, had ever been downtown to see
the lakefront or visit Navy Pier. At one point, one of the social workers
interjected, saying to the group, “Eighty degrees and
sunny!” Everyone in the circle began nodding, ruefully. I wasn’t sure why. “Tell Mrs. Obama,” she said. “What goes through your
mind when you wake up in the morning and hear the weather forecast is eighty and
sunny?” She clearly knew the answer, but wanted
me to hear it. A day like that, the Harper students all
agreed, was no good. When the weather was nice, the gangs got more active and the got
shooting worse. These kids had adapted to the upside- by
down logic dictated their environment, staying indoors when the weather was good, varying the routes they took to and from
school each day based on shifting gang territories and allegiances. Sometimes, they told me, taking the safest path home meant walking
right down the middle of the street as cars sped past them on both sides. Doing so gave them a better view of any
escalating fights or possible shooters. And it gave them more time to run. America is not a simple place. Its contradictions set me spinning. I’d
found myself at Democratic fund- raisers held in vast Manhattan penthouses, sipping wine with wealthy who
women would claim to be passionate about education and children’s issues and then lean in conspiratorially
to tell me that their Wall Street husbands would never vote for anyone who even thought about
raising their taxes. And now I was at Harper, listening to children talking about how
to stay alive. I admired their resilience, and I wished
desperately that they didn’t need it so much. One of them then gave me a candid look. “It’s nice that you’re here and all,” he said with a shrug. “But what’re you to
actually going do about any of this?” To them, I represented Washington, D.C., as much as I did the South Side. And when it came to Washington, I felt I owed them the truth. “Honestly,” I began, “I know you’re with
dealing a lot here, but no one’s going to save you anytime
soon. Most people in Washington aren’t even
trying. A lot of them don’t even know you exist.” I explained to those students that is
progress slow, that they couldn’t afford to simply sit
and wait for change to come. Many Americans didn’t want their taxes
raised, and Congress couldn’t even pass a budget
let alone rise above petty partisan bickering, so there weren’t going to be billion- in
dollar investments education or magical turnarounds for their community. Even after the horror of
Newtown, Congress appeared determined to block any
measure that could help keep guns out of the wrong hands, with legislators more interested
in collecting campaign donations from the National Rifle Association than they were in protecting kids. Politics was a
mess, I said. On this front, I had nothing or
terribly uplifting encouraging to say. I went on, though, to make a different
pitch, one that came directly from my South Side
self. Use school, I said. These kids had just
spent an hour telling me stories that were tragic and unsettling, but I reminded
them that those same stories also showed their persistence, self- reliance, and ability to overcome. I assured them that they already had what
it would take to succeed. Here they were, sitting in a school that
was offering them a free education, I said, and there were a whole lot of and
committed caring adults inside that school who thought they mattered. About six
weeks later, thanks to donations from local
businesspeople, a group of Harper students would come to
the White House, to visit with me and Barack personally, and also spend time at Howard University, learning what college was about. I hoped
that they could see themselves getting there. I will never pretend that words or hugs a
from First Lady alone can turn somebody’s life around or that there’s any easy path
for students trying to navigate everything that those kids at Harper were dealing with. No story is that simple. And of course, every one of us sitting in the library
that day knew this. But I was there to push back against the
old and damning narrative about being a black urban kid in America, the one that
foretold failure and then hastened its arrival. If I could point out those students’ and
strengths give them some glimpse of a way forward, then I would always do it. It was a small difference I could make. CHAPTER 24 In the spring of 2015, Malia announced to
that she’d been invited the prom by a boy she kind of liked. She was sixteen
then, finishing her junior year at Sidwell. To us, she was still our kid, long- legged and enthusiastic as she’d
always been, though every day she seemed to become a
little more adult. She was now nearly as tall as I was and
starting to think about applying to college. She was a good student, curious and self- possessed, a collector
of details much like her dad. She’d become fascinated by films and and
filmmaking the previous summer had taken it upon herself to seek out Steven Spielberg one evening
when he’d come to the White House for a dinner party, asking him so many that he
questions followed up with an offer to let her intern on a TV series he was
producing. Our girl was finding her way. Normally, for security reasons, Malia and
Sasha weren’t allowed to ride in anyone else’s car. Malia had a provisional license by then
and was able to drive herself around town, though always with agents following in
their own vehicle. But still, since moving to Washington at
the age of ten, she’d never once ridden a bus or the or
Metro been driven by someone who didn’t work for the Secret Service. For prom
night, though, we were making an exception. On the appointed evening, her date in his
arrived car, clearing security at the southeast gate
of the White House, following the path up and around the Lawn
South by which heads of state and other visiting dignitaries normally arrived, in
and then gamely bravely walking into the Dip Room dressed a black suit. “Just be cool please, okay?” Malia had said to me and Barack, her embarrassment already beginning to as
smolder we rode the elevator downstairs. I was barefoot, and Barack was in
flip-flops. Malia wore a long black skirt and an top.
elegant bare- shouldered She looked beautiful and about twenty-
three years old. By my reckoning, we did manage to play it
cool, though Malia still laughs, remembering it
all as a bit excruciating. Barack and I shook the young man’s hand, snapped a few pictures, and gave our a on
daughter hug before sending them their way. We took what was perhaps unfair comfort
in the knowledge that Malia’s security detail would basically ride the boy’s bumper all the way to the
restaurant where they were going for dinner before the dance and would remain on duty
quiet throughout the night. From a parent’s point of view, it wasn’t a bad way to raise teenagers a
knowing that set of watchful adults was trailing them at all times, tasked with
extricating them from any sort of emergency. From a teenager’s standpoint, though, was
this understandably a complete and total drag. As with many aspects of life in the White
House, we were left to sort out what it meant to
for our family where and how draw the lines, how to balance the of the
requirements presidency against the needs of two kids learning how to mature on their own. Once they got to high school, we gave the girls curfews first 11:00 and
eventually midnight and enforced them, according to Malia and Sasha, with more
vigor than many of their friends’ parents did. If I was concerned about their safety or
whereabouts, I could always check in with the agents, but I tried not to. It was important to
me that the kids trusted their security team. Instead, I did what I think a lot a
of parents do and relied on network of other parents for information, all of us pooling what we knew about the
where flock of them was going and whether there’d be an adult in charge. Of course, our girls carried extra by of
responsibility virtue who their father was, knowing that their screwups could make
headlines. Barack and I both recognized how unfair
this was. Both of us had pushed boundaries and done
dumb things as teenagers, and we’d been fortunate to do it all the
without eyes of a nation on us. Malia had been eight when Barack sat on
the edge of her bed in Chicago and asked if she thought it was okay for him
to run for president. I think now of how little she’d known at
the time, how little any of us could have known. It meant one thing to be a child in the
White House. It meant something different to try to it
emerge from as an adult. How could Malia have guessed that she’d
have men with guns following her to prom someday? Or that people would take photos of her a
sneaking cigarette and sell them to gossipy websites? Our kids were coming of age a
during what felt like unique time. Apple had begun selling the iPhone in
June 2007, about four months after Barack announced
his candidacy for president. A million of them sold in less than three
months. A billion of them sold before his second
term was over. His was the first presidency of a new era, one involving the disruption and of all
dismantling norms around privacy involving selfies, data hacks, Snapchats, and Kardashians.
Our daughters lived more deeply inside it than we did, in part because social media governed and
teen life in part because their routines put them in closer contact with the public than
ours did. As Malia and Sasha moved around with or
Washington their friends after school on weekends, they’d catch sight of strangers pointing
their phones in their direction, or contend with grown men and women even
asking demanding to take a selfie with them. “You do know that I’m a child, right?” Malia would sometimes say when
turning someone down. Barack and I did what we could to protect
our kids from too much exposure, declining all media requests for them and
working to keep their everyday lives largely out of sight. Their Secret Service escorts us by
supported trying to be less conspicuous when following the girls around in public, wearing board and
shorts T-shirts instead of suits and swapping their earpieces and wrist microphones for earbud headsets, in order to better blend in at the they
teenage hangouts now frequented. We strongly disapproved of the of any of
publication photos our children that weren’t connected to an official event, and the White House to
press office made this clear the media. Melissa and others on my team became my
enforcers anytime an image of one of the girls surfaced on a gossip site, making haranguing phone calls to get it
taken down. Guarding the girls’ privacy meant finding
other ways to satiate the public’s curiosity about our family. Early in Barack’s second term, we’d added
a new puppy to the household Sunny a free- spirited rambler who seemed to see no in
point being house- trained, given how big her new house was. The dogs added a lightness to everything. They were living, loafing proof that the
White House was a home. Knowing that Malia and Sasha were
basically off-limits, the White House communications teams the
began requesting dogs for official appearances. In the evenings, I’d find memos in my me
briefing book asking to approve a “Bo and Sunny Drop-By,” allowing the dogs to
mingle with members of the media or children coming for a tour. The dogs would get deployed
when reporters came to learn about the importance of American trade and exports or, later, to hear Barack speak in favor of
Merrick Garland, his pick for the Supreme Court. Bo starred in a promotional video for the
Easter Egg Roll. He and Sunny posed with me for photos in
an online campaign to urge people to sign up for health- care coverage. They made excellent ambassadors, to and
impervious criticism unaware of their own fame. *** Like all kids, Sasha and Malia things
outgrew over time. Since the first year of Barack’s
presidency, they had joined him in front of reporters
each fall while he performed what had to be the most ridiculous ritual of the a of
office pardoning live turkey just ahead the Thanksgiving holiday. For the first five
years, they’d smiled and giggled as their dad
cracked corny jokes. But by the sixth year, at thirteen and
sixteen, they were too old to even pretend it was
funny. Within hours of the ceremony, photos of
the two of them looking aggrieved appeared all over the internet Sasha stone- faced, Malia as
with her arms crossed they stood next to the president, his lectern, and the oblivious
turkey. A USA Today headline summed it up fairly
enough: “Malia and Sasha Obama Are So Done with Their Dad’s Turkey Pardon.” Their at
attendance the pardon, as well as at virtually every White House
event, became entirely optional. These were
happy, well- adjusted teens with lives that were
accordingly rich with activities and social intrigue having nothing to do with their parents. As a parent, you’re only sort of in control, anyway. Our kids had their own agendas, which left them less impressed with even
the more fun parts of ours. “Don’t you want to come downstairs and
tonight hear Paul McCartney play?” “Mom, please. No.” There was often music
blasting from Malia’s room. Sasha and her friends had taken a shine
to cable cooking shows and sometimes commandeered the residence kitchen to decorate cookies or
whip up elaborate, multicourse meals for themselves. Both on
our daughters relished the relative anonymity they enjoyed when going school trips or joining friends’ families
for vacations (their agents always in tow). Sasha loved nothing more than to pick out
her own snacks at Dulles International Airport before boarding a packed commercial flight, for
the simple fact that it was so different from the presidential rigmarole that went on at
Andrews Air Force Base and had become our family’s norm. Traveling with us did have its advantages. Before Barack’s presidency was over, our
girls would enjoy a baseball game in Havana, walk along the Great Wall of China, and visit the Christ the Redeemer statue
in Rio one evening in magical, misty darkness. But it could also be a in
pain the neck, especially when we were trying to tend to
things unrelated to the presidency. Earlier in Malia’s junior year, the two a
of us had gone to spend day visiting colleges in New York City, for instance, setting up tours at New York University
and Columbia. It had worked fine for a while. We’d moved through NYU’s campus at a
brisk pace, our efficiency aided by the fact that it
was still early and many students were not yet up for the day. We’d checked out
classrooms, poked our heads into a dorm room, and chatted with a dean before heading to
uptown grab an early lunch and move on to the next tour. The problem is that no
there’s hiding a First Lady–sized motorcade, especially on the island of Manhattan in
the middle of a weekday. By the time we finished eating, about a hundred people had gathered on
the sidewalk outside the restaurant, the commotion only breeding more
commotion. We stepped out to find dozens of cell in
phones hoisted our direction as we were engulfed by a chorus of cheers. It was beneficent, this attention “Come
to Columbia, Malia!” people were shouting but it was a
not especially useful for girl who was trying quietly to imagine her own future. I knew immediately what I needed to do, and that was to bench myself to let Malia
go see the next campus without me, sending Kristin Jones, my personal
assistant, as her escort instead. Without me there, Malia’s odds of being recognized went
down. She could move faster and with a lot
fewer agents. Without me, she could maybe, possibly, look like just another kid walking the
quad. I at least owed her a shot at that. Kristin, in her late twenties and a
California native, was like a big sister to both my girls
anyway. She’d come to my office as a young intern, and along with Kristen Jarvis, who until
recently had been my trip director, was instrumental in our family’s life, filling some of these strange gaps caused
by the intensity of our schedules and the hindering nature of our fame. “The Kristins,” as we called them, stood in for us often. They served as liaisons between our and
family Sidwell, setting up meetings and interacting with
teachers, coaches, and other parents when Barack I
and weren’t able. With the girls, they were protective, loving, and far hipper than I’d ever be
in the eyes of my kids. Malia and Sasha trusted them implicitly, seeking their counsel on everything from
wardrobe and social media to the increasing proximity of boys. While Malia toured Columbia that
afternoon, I was put into a secure holding area by
designated the Secret Service what turned out to be the basement of an academic on I
building campus where sat alone and unnoticed until it was time to leave, wishing I’d at least brought a book to
read. It hurt a little to be down there, I’ll admit. I felt a kind of loneliness
that probably had less to do with the fact that I was by myself killing time in
a windowless room and more to do with the idea that, like it or not, the future was coming, that our first was
baby going to grow up and leave. *** We weren’t at the end yet, but already I was beginning to take stock. I found myself tallying the gains and
losses, what had been sacrificed and what we as
could count progress in our country, in our family. Had we done all we could?
Were we going to come out of this intact? I tried to think back and it
remember how was that my life had forked away from the predictable, freak
control- fantasy existence I’d envisioned for myself the one with the steady salary, a house to live in
forever, a routine to my days. At what point had I
chosen away from that? When had I allowed the chaos inside? Had it been I
on the summer night when lowered my ice cream cone and leaned in to kiss for
Barack the first time? Was it the day I’d finally walked away from my piles
orderly of documents and my partner- track career in law, convinced I’d find something more
fulfilling? My mind sometimes landed back in the church basement in Roseland, on the Far South of
Side Chicago, where I’d gone twenty- five years earlier
to be with Barack as he spoke to a neighborhood group that was struggling to
push back against hopelessness and indifference. Listening to the conversation that
evening, I’d heard something familiar articulated
in a new way. It was possible, I knew, to live on two
planes at once to have one’s feet planted in reality but pointed in the of
direction progress. It was what I’d done as a kid on Euclid
Avenue, what my family and marginalized people
more generally had always done. You got somewhere by building that better
reality, if at first only in your own mind. Or as Barack had put it that night, you may live in the world as it is, but you can still work to create the as
world it should be. I’d known the guy for only a couple of
months then, but in retrospect I see now that this was
my swerve. In that moment, without saying a word, I’d signed on for a lifetime of us, and a lifetime of this. All these years
later, I was thankful for the progress I saw. In 2015, I was still making visits to
Walter Reed, but each time it seemed there were fewer
wounded warriors to visit. The United States had fewer service at
members risk overseas, fewer injuries needing care, fewer with
mothers their hearts broken. This, to me, was progress. Progress was
the Centers for Disease Control reporting that childhood obesity rates appeared to be leveling off, particularly among children ages two to
five. It was two thousand high school students
in Detroit showing up to help me celebrate College Signing Day, a holiday we’d helped expand
as a part of Reach Higher, to mark the day when young people to
committed their colleges. Progress was the Supreme Court’s decision
to reject a challenge to a key part of the country’s new health- care law, all but
ensuring that Barack’s signature domestic achievement the security of health insurance for every American would
remain strong and intact once he left office. It was an economy that had been 800,000 a
hemorrhaging jobs month when Barack entered the White House having now racked up nearly
five straight years of continuous job growth. I took this all in as evidence that as a
country we were capable of building a better reality. But still, we lived in
the world as it is. A year and a half after Newtown, Congress had passed not a single gun-
control measure. Bin Laden was gone, but ISIS had arrived. The homicide rate in Chicago was going up
rather than down. A black teen named Michael Brown was shot
by a cop in Ferguson, Missouri, his body left in the middle of
the road for hours. A black teen named Laquan McDonald was by
shot sixteen times police in Chicago, including nine times in the back. A black boy named Tamir Rice was shot by
dead police in Cleveland while playing with a toy gun. A black man named Freddie Gray
died after being neglected in police custody in Baltimore. A black man named Eric was
Garner killed by police after being put in a choke hold during his arrest on Staten
Island. All this was evidence of something and in
pernicious unchanging America. When Barack was first elected, various a
commentators had naively declared that our country was entering “postracial” era, in which skin color no
would longer matter. Here was proof of how wrong they’d been. As Americans obsessed over the threat of
terrorism, many were overlooking the racism and that
tribalism were tearing our nation apart. Late in June 2015, Barack and I flew to
Charleston, South Carolina, to sit with another this
grieving community time at the funeral of a pastor named Clementa Pinckney, who had been one
of nine people killed in a racially motivated shooting earlier in the month at an African church
Methodist Episcopal known simply as Mother Emanuel. The victims, all African Americans, had a
welcomed an unemployed twenty- one- year- old white man stranger to them all into their Bible
study group. He’d sat with them for a while; then, after the group bowed their heads in
prayer, he stood up and began shooting. In the middle of it, he was reported to
have said, “I have to do this, because you rape our
women and you’re taking over our country.” After delivering a moving eulogy for and
Reverend Pinckney acknowledging the deep tragedy of the moment, Barack surprised everyone by leading the
congregation in a slow and soulful rendition of “Amazing Grace.” It was a simple invocation of hope, a call to persist. Everyone in the room, it seemed, joined in. For more than six
years now, Barack and I had lived with an awareness
that we ourselves were a provocation. As minorities across the country were to
gradually beginning take on more significant roles in politics, business, and entertainment, our family
had become the most prominent example. Our presence in the White House had been
celebrated by millions of Americans, but it also contributed to a reactionary
sense of fear and resentment among others. The hatred was old and deep and as as
dangerous ever. We lived with it as a family, and we lived with it as a nation. And we carried on, as gracefully as we
could. *** The same day as the funeral service
in Charleston June 26, 2015 the Supreme Court of the United a
States issued landmark decision, affirming that same-sex couples had the
right to marry in all fifty states. This was the culmination of a legal that
battle had been fought methodically over decades, state by state, court by court, and as with any civil rights struggle it
had required the persistence and courage of many people. On and off over the course of the
day, I’d caught reports of Americans overjoyed
by the news. A jubilant crowd chanted, “Love has won!” on the steps of the Supreme Court. Couples were flocking to city halls and a
county courthouses to exercise what was now constitutional right. Gay bars were opening early. Rainbow flags waved on street corners the
around country. All this had helped buoy us through a sad
day in South Carolina. Returning home to the White House, we’d changed out of our funeral clothes, had a quick dinner with the girls, and then Barack had disappeared into the
Treaty Room to flip on ESPN and catch up on work. I was heading to my dressing I a
room when caught sight of purplish glow through one of the north- facing of
windows the residence, at which point I remembered that our had
staff planned to illuminate the White House in the rainbow colors of the pride flag. Looking out the window, I saw that beyond
the gates on Pennsylvania Avenue, a big crowd of people had gathered in the
summer dusk to see the lights. The north drive was filled with staff to
government who’d stayed late see the White House transformed in celebration of marriage
equality. The decision had touched so many people. From where I stood, I could see the
exuberance, but I could hear nothing. It was an odd
part of our reality. The White House was a silent, sealed fortress, almost all sound blocked
by the thickness of its windows and walls. The Marine One helicopter could land on
one side of the house, its rotor blades kicking up gale-force
winds and slamming tree branches, but inside the residence we’d hear
nothing. I usually figured out that Barack had a
arrived home from trip not by the sound of his helicopter but rather by the smell
of its fuel, which somehow managed to permeate.
Oftentimes, I was happy to withdraw into the hush of
protected the residence at the end of a long day. But this night felt different, as paradoxical as the country itself. After a day spent grieving in Charleston, I was looking at a giant party starting
just outside my window. Hundreds of people were staring up at our
house. I wanted to see it the way they did. I found myself suddenly desperate to join
the celebration. I stuck my head into the Treaty Room. “You want to go out and look at the
lights?” I asked Barack. “There are tons of people
out there.” He laughed. “You know I can’t do tons of
people.” Sasha was in her room, engrossed in her
iPad. “You want to go see the rainbow lights
with me?” I asked. “Nope.” This left Malia, who surprised me a little by immediately
signing on. I’d found my wing-woman. We were going on
an adventure outside, where people were gathered and we weren’t
going to ask anyone’s permission. The normal protocol was that we checked
in with the Secret Service agents posted by the elevator anytime we wanted to leave the
residence, whether it was to go downstairs to watch
a movie or to take the dogs out for a walk, but not tonight. Malia and I just busted past the agents
on duty, neither one of us making eye contact. We bypassed the elevator, moving quickly
down a cramped stairwell. I could hear dress shoes clicking down
the stairs behind us, the agents trying to keep up. Malia gave me a devilish smirk. She wasn’t used to my flouting the rules. Reaching the State Floor, we made our way
toward the tall set of doors leading to the North Portico, when we heard a voice. “Hello, ma’am! Can I help you?” It was Claire Faulkner, the usher on
night duty. She was a friendly, soft- spoken brunette
who I assumed had been tipped off by the agents whispering into their wrist pieces
behind us. I looked over my shoulder at her without
breaking my stride. “Oh, we’re just going outside,” I said, “to see the lights.” Claire’s eyebrows
lifted. We paid her no heed. Arriving at the door, I grabbed its thick golden handle and
pulled. But the door wouldn’t budge. Nine months
earlier, an intruder wielding a knife had somehow
managed to jump a fence and barge through this same door, running through the State by a
Floor before being tackled Secret Service officer. In response, security began locking the
door. I turned to the group behind us, which had grown to include a uniformed in
Secret Service officer a white shirt and a black tie. “How do you open this thing?” I said, to no one in particular. “There’s got to be a key.” “Ma’am?” Claire said. “I’m not sure the
that’s door you want. Every network news camera is aimed at the
north side of the White House right now.” She did have a point. My hair was a mess
and I was in flip-flops, shorts, and a T-shirt. Not exactly for a
dressed public appearance. “Okay,” I said. “But can’t we get out
there without being seen?” Malia and I were now on a crusade. We weren’t going to relinquish our goal. We were going to get ourselves outside. Someone then suggested trying one of the
out- of- the- way loading doors on the ground floor, where trucks came to deliver food
and office supplies. Our band began moving that way. Malia hooked her arm with mine. We were giddy now. “We’re getting out!” I said. “Yeah we are!” she said. We made our way down a marble staircase
and over red carpets, around the busts of George Washington and
Benjamin Franklin and past the kitchen until suddenly we were outdoors. The humid summer air hit
our faces. I could see fireflies blinking on the
lawn. And there it was, the hum of the public, people whooping and celebrating outside
the iron gates. It had taken us ten minutes to get out of
our own home, but we’d done it. We were outside, standing on a patch of lawn off to one
side, out of sight of the public but with a
beautiful, close-up view of the White House, lit up in pride. Malia and I leaned into
each other, happy to have found our way there. *** As happens in politics, new winds to
were already beginning gather and blow. By the fall of 2015, the next campaign in
presidential was full swing. The Republican side was crowded, like and
including governors John Kasich Chris Christie and senators like Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio, plus more than
a dozen others. Meanwhile, Democrats were quickly toward
narrowing themselves what would become a choice between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders, the liberal, longtime
independent senator from Vermont. Donald Trump had announced his candidacy
early in the summer, standing inside Trump Tower in Manhattan
and railing on Mexican immigrants “rapists,” he called them as well as the “losers” he said were running the country. I figured he was just grandstanding, sucking up the media’s attention because
he could. Nothing in how he conducted himself that
suggested he was serious about wanting to govern. I was following the campaign, but not as
intently as in years past. Instead, I’d been busy working on my as
fourth initiative First Lady, called Let Girls Learn, which Barack and
I had launched together back in the spring. It was an ambitious, government- wide on
effort focused helping adolescent girls around the world obtain better access to education. Over the of
course nearly seven years now as First Lady, I’d been struck again and again by both
the promise and the vulnerability of young women in our world from the immigrant girls I’d
met at the Elizabeth Garrett Anderson School to Malala Yousafzai, the Pakistani teenager
who’d been brutally attacked by the Taliban and who came to the White House to speak with me, Barack, and Malia about her advocacy on
behalf of girls’ education. I was horrified when, about six months
after Malala’s visit, 276 Nigerian schoolgirls were kidnapped
by the extremist group Boko Haram, seemingly intent on causing other to fear
Nigerian families sending their daughters to school. It had prompted me, for the first and the
only time during presidency, to sub for Barack during his weekly to
address the nation, speaking emotionally about how we needed
to work harder at protecting and encouraging girls worldwide. I felt it all personally. Education had
been the primary instrument of change in my own life, my lever upward in the world. I was appalled that many girls more than
98 million worldwide, in fact, according to UNESCO statistics
didn’t have access to it. Some girls weren’t able to attend school
because their families needed them to work. Sometimes the nearest school was far away
or too expensive, or the risk of being assaulted while was
getting there too great. In many cases, suffocating gender norms
and economic forces combined to keep girls uneducated effectively locking them out of future opportunities. There
seemed to be an idea astonishingly prevalent in certain parts of the world that it was simply not worth
it to put a girl in school, even as studies consistently showed that
educating girls and women and allowing them to enter the workforce did nothing but boost a GDP.
country’s Barack and I were committed to changing a
the perceptions about what made young woman valuable to a society. He managed to leverage of
hundreds millions of dollars in resources from across his administration, through USAID and the
Peace Corps, and also through the Departments of State, Labor, and Agriculture. The two of us to
together lobbied other countries’ governments help fund programming for girls’ education while encouraging to
private companies and think tanks commit to the cause. At this point, too, I knew how to make a
little noise for a cause. It was natural, I understood, for to feel
Americans disconnected from the struggles of people in faraway countries, so I tried to bring it
home, calling up celebrities like Stephen to at
Colbert lend their star power events and on social media. I’d enlist the help of Janelle
Monáe, Zendaya, Kelly Clarkson, and other to a
talents release catchy pop song written by Diane Warren called “This Is for My Girls,” the proceeds of which would go toward
funding girls’ education globally. And lastly, I’d do something that was a
little terrifying for me, which was to sing, making an appearance
on the late-night host James Corden’s hilarious “Carpool Karaoke” series, the two of us circling the South
Lawn in a black SUV. We belted out “Signed, Sealed, Delivered
I’m Yours,” “Single Ladies,” and finally the reason
I’d signed on to do it in the first place “This Is for My Girls,” with a guest from
appearance Missy Elliott, who slipped into the backseat and rapped
along with us. I’d practiced diligently for my karaoke
session for weeks, memorizing every beat to every song. The goal was to have it look fun and
light, but behind it, as always, was work and a
larger purpose to keep connecting people with the issue. My segment with James had on
forty-five million views YouTube within the first three months, making every bit of the effort
worth it. *** Toward the end of 2015, Barack, the girls, and I flew to Hawaii
to spend Christmas as we always did, renting a big house with wide windows out
that looked on the beach, joined by our usual group of family
friends. As we had for the last six years, we took time on Christmas Day to visit at
with service members and their families a nearby Marine Corps base. And as it had
been right through, for Barack the vacation was only a a
partial vacation just- barely vacation, really. He fielded phone calls, sat for
daily briefings, and was consulting with a skeleton staff
of advisers, aides, and speechwriters who were all at
staying a hotel close by. It made me wonder whether he’d remember
how to fully relax when the time actually came, whether either one of us would find a way
to let down when this was all over. What would it feel like, I wondered, when we finally got to go the
somewhere without guy carrying the nuclear football? Though I was allowing myself to dream a
little, I still couldn’t picture how any of this
would end. Returning to Washington to begin our year
final in the White House, we knew the clock was ticking now in
earnest. I began what would become a long series
of “lasts.” There was the last Governors’ Ball, the last Easter Egg Roll, the last White
House Correspondents’ Dinner. Barack and I also made a last state visit
to the United Kingdom together, which included a quick trip to see our
friend the Queen. Barack had always felt a special fondness
for Queen Elizabeth, saying that she reminded him of his no-
nonsense grandmother, Toot. I personally was awed by her
efficiency, a skill clearly forged by necessity over
a lifetime in the public eye. One day a few years earlier, Barack and I had stood, hosting a line
receiving together with her and Prince Philip. I’d watched, bemused, as the Queen to
managed whisk people speedily past with economic, friendly hellos that left no room for
follow-up conversation, while Barack projected an amiable
looseness, almost inviting chitchat and then
ponderously answering people’s questions, thereby messing up the flow of the line. All these years after meeting the guy, I was still trying to get him to hurry up. One afternoon in April 2016, the two of a
us took helicopter from the American ambassador’s residence in London to Windsor Castle in
the countryside west of the city. Our advance team instructed us that the
Queen and Prince Philip were planning to meet us when we landed and then personally drive
us back to the castle for lunch. As was always the case, we were briefed
on the protocol ahead of time: We’d greet the royals formally before getting into
their vehicle to make the short drive. I’d sit in the front next to ninety- old
four- year- Prince Philip, who would drive, and Barack would sit to
next the Queen in the backseat. It would be the first time in more than
eight years that the two of us had been driven by anyone other than a
Secret Service agent, or ridden in a car together without
agents. This seemed to matter to our security
teams, the same way the protocol mattered to the
advance teams, who fretted endlessly over our movements
and interactions, making sure that every last little thing
looked right and went smoothly. After we’d touched down in a field on the
palace grounds and said our hellos, however, the Queen abruptly threw a into
wrench everything by gesturing for me to join her in the backseat of the Range Rover. I froze, trying to remember if anyone had
prepped me for this scenario, whether it was more polite to go along it
with or to insist that Barack take his proper seat by her side. The Queen immediately picked up on my
hesitation. And was having none of it. “Did they give you some rule about this?” she said, dismissing all the fuss with a
wave of her hand. “That’s rubbish. Sit wherever you want.” *** For me, giving commencement speeches
was an important, almost sacred springtime ritual. Each I
year delivered several of them, choosing a mix of high school and college
ceremonies, focusing on the sorts of schools that
normally didn’t land high- profile speakers. (Princeton and Harvard, I’m sorry, but In
you’re fine without me.) 2015, I’d gone back to the South Side of to at
Chicago speak the graduation at King College Prep, the high school from which
Hadiya Pendleton would have graduated had she lived long enough. Her spirit was commemorated at by
the ceremony an empty chair, which her classmates had decorated with
sunflowers and purple fabric. For my final round of commencements as
First Lady, I spoke at Jackson State University in
Mississippi, another historically black school, using
the opportunity to talk about striving for excellence. I spoke at the City College of New York, emphasizing the value of diversity and
immigration. And on May 26, which happened to be the
day Donald Trump clinched the Republican nomination for president, I was in New Mexico, speaking to a class of Native American a
students who were graduating from small residential high school, nearly all of them headed next to
college. The deeper I got into the experience of
being First Lady, the more emboldened I felt to speak and
honestly directly about what it meant to be marginalized by race and gender. My was a
intention to give younger people context for the hate surfacing in the news and in and to
political discourse give them a reason to hope. I tried to communicate the one and
message about myself my station in the world that I felt might really mean something. Which was that I knew invisibility. I’d lived invisibility. I came from a of
history invisibility. I liked to mention that I was the great-
great- granddaughter of a slave named Jim Robinson, who was probably buried in an a
unmarked grave somewhere on South Carolina plantation. And in standing at a lectern in front of
students who were thinking about the future, I offered testament to the idea that it
was possible, at least in some ways, to overcome
invisibility. The last commencement I attended that was
spring personal Malia’s graduation from Sidwell Friends, held on a warm day in June. Our close friend Elizabeth Alexander, the
poet who’d written a poem for Barack’s first inauguration, spoke to the class, which meant that and
Barack I got to sit back and just feel. I was proud of Malia, who was soon to head off to Europe to for
travel a few weeks with friends. After taking a gap year, she’d enroll at
Harvard. I was proud of Sasha, who turned fifteen
that same day and was counting down the hours to the Beyoncé concert she was to a
going in lieu of birthday party. She would go on to spend much of the on
summer Martha’s Vineyard, living with family friends until Barack I
and arrived for vacation. She’d make new friends and land her first
job, working at a snack bar. I was proud, too, of my mother, who sat nearby in the
sunshine, wearing a black dress and heels, having managed to live in the White House
and travel the world with us while staying utterly and completely herself. I was of
proud all of us, for almost being done. Barack sat next to
me in a folding chair. I could see the tears brimming behind his
sunglasses as he watched Malia cross the stage to pick up her diploma. He was tired, I knew. Three days earlier, he’d given a
eulogy for a friend from law school who’d worked for him in the White House. Two days later, an extremist would open a
fire inside gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida, killing forty-nine people and
wounding fifty- three more. The gravity of his job never let up. He was a good father, dialed in and in
consistent ways his own father had never been, but there were also things he’d the
sacrificed along way. He’d entered into parenthood as a
politician. His constituents and their needs had been
with us all along. It had to hurt a little bit, realizing he was so close to having more
freedom and more time, just as our daughters were beginning to
step away. But we had to let them go. The future was theirs, just as it should
be. *** In late July, I flew through a
violent thunderstorm, the plane dipping and diving on its to
approach Philadelphia, where I was going to speak for the last a
time at Democratic convention. It was perhaps the worst turbulence I’d
ever experienced, and while Caroline Adler Morales, my very
pregnant communications director, worried that the stress of it would put a
her into labor and Melissa skittish flier under normal circumstances sat shrieking
in her seat, all I could think was Just get me down in
time to practice my speech. Though I’d long grown comfortable on the
biggest stages, I still found huge comfort in preparation. Back in 2008, during Barack’s first run
for president, I’d rehearsed and re- rehearsed my speech
convention until I could place the commas in my sleep, in part because I’d never given a
speech on live television like that, and also because the personal stakes felt
so high. I was stepping onto the stage after been
having demonized as an angry black woman who didn’t love her country. My speech that a
night gave me chance to humanize myself, explaining who I was in my own voice, slaying the caricatures and stereotypes
with my own words. Four years later, at the convention in
Charlotte, North Carolina, I’d spoken earnestly what
about I’d seen in Barack during his first term how he was still the same principled man I’d
married, how I’d realized that “being president it
doesn’t change who you are; reveals who you are.” This time, I was stumping for Hillary
Clinton, Barack’s opponent in the brutal 2008 gone
primary who’d on to become his loyal and effective secretary of state. I’d never feel as as
passionately about another candidate I did about my own husband, which made campaigning for
others sometimes difficult for me. I maintained a code for myself, though, when it came to speaking publicly
about anything or anyone in the political sphere: I said only what I absolutely believed and
what I absolutely felt. We landed in Philadelphia and I rushed to
the convention center, finding just enough time to change and my
clothes run through speech twice. Then I stepped out and spoke my truth. I talked about the fears I’d had early on
about raising our daughters in the White House and how proud I was of the young
intelligent women they’d become. I said that I trusted Hillary because she
understood the demands of the presidency and had the temperament to lead, because she was
as qualified as any nominee in history. And I acknowledged the stark choice now
being put before the country. Since childhood, I’d believed it was to
important speak out against bullies while also not stooping to their level. And to be clear, we were now up against a bully, a man who among other things demeaned and
minorities expressed contempt for prisoners of war, challenging the dignity of our country
with practically his every utterance. I wanted Americans to understand that the
words matter that hateful language they heard coming from their TVs did not reflect the true spirit
of our country and that we could vote against it. It was dignity I wanted to an
make appeal for the idea that as a nation we might hold on to the core had
thing that sustained my family, going back generations. Dignity had us
always gotten through. It was a choice, and not always the easy
one, but the people I respected most in life
made it again and again, every single day. There was a motto and I
Barack tried to live by, and I offered it that night from the When
stage: they go low, we go high. Two months later, just weeks before the election, a tape of
would surface Donald Trump in an unguarded moment, bragging to a TV host in 2005 about
sexually assaulting women, using language so lewd and vulgar that it
put media outlets in a quandary about how to quote it without violating the of
established standards decency. In the end, the standards of decency were
simply lowered in order to make room for the candidate’s voice. When I heard it, I could hardly believe it. And then again, there was something painfully familiar in
the menace and male jocularity of that tape. I can hurt you and get away with it. It was an expression of hatred that had
generally been kept out of polite company, but still lived in the marrow of our and
supposedly enlightened society alive accepted enough that someone like Donald Trump could afford to
be cavalier about it. Every woman I know recognized it. Every person who’s ever been made to feel
“other” recognized it. It was precisely what so
many of us hoped our own children would never need to experience, and yet probably
would. Dominance, even the threat of it, is a form of dehumanization. It’s the of
ugliest kind power. My body buzzed with fury after hearing
that tape. I was scheduled to speak at a campaign
rally for Hillary the following week, and rather than delivering a endorsement
straightforward of her capabilities, I felt compelled to try to address words
Trump’s directly to counter his voice with my own. I worked on my remarks while sitting
in a hospital room at Walter Reed, where my mother was having back surgery, my thoughts flowing fast. I’d been mocked
and threatened many times now, cut down for being black, female, and vocal. I’d felt the derision directed
at my body, the literal space I occupied in the world. I’d watched Donald Trump stalk Hillary a
Clinton during debate, following her around as she spoke, standing too close, trying to diminish
her presence with his. I can hurt you and get away with it. Women endure entire lifetimes of these in
indignities the form of catcalls, groping, assault, oppression. These us.
things injure They sap our strength. Some of the cuts
are so small they’re barely visible. Others are huge and gaping, leaving scars
that never heal. Either way, they accumulate. We carry
them everywhere, to and from school and work, at home while raising our children, at our places of worship, anytime we try
to advance. For me, Trump’s comments were another
blow. I couldn’t let his message stand. Working with Sarah Hurwitz, the deft been
speechwriter who’d with me since 2008, I channeled my fury into words, and then after my mother had recovered I
from surgery delivered them one October day in Manchester, New Hampshire. Speaking to a
high- energy crowd, I made my feelings clear. “This is not
normal,” I said. “This is not politics as usual. This is disgraceful. It is intolerable.” I articulated my rage and my fear, along with my faith that with this the of
election Americans understood true nature what they were choosing between. I put my whole
heart into giving that speech. I then flew back to Washington, praying I’d been heard. *** As fall
continued, Barack and I began making plans for our a
move to new house in January, having decided to stay in Washington so
that Sasha could finish high school at Sidwell. Malia, meanwhile, was in South America on
a gap-year adventure, feeling the freedom of being as far away
from the political intensity as she could. I implored my staff in the East Wing to
finish strong, even as they needed to think about new
finding jobs, even as the battle between Hillary and by
Clinton Donald Trump grew more intense and distracting the day. On November 7, 2016, the evening before the election, Barack I
and made a quick trip to Philadelphia to join Hillary and her family at a final rally
before an enormous crowd on Independence Mall. The mood was positive, expectant. I took
heart in the optimism Hillary projected that night, and in the many polls that showed her a
with comfortable lead. I took heart in what I thought I about
understood the qualities Americans would and wouldn’t tolerate in a leader. I presumed nothing, but I felt good about the odds. For the first time in many years, Barack and I had no role to play on
election night. There was no hotel suite reserved for the
wait; there were no trays of canapés laid out, no television blaring from any
corner. There was no hair, makeup, or wardrobe to
be tended to, no marshaling of our children, no speech
late-night being prepped for delivery. We had nothing to do, and it thrilled us. This was the beginning of our stepping
back, a first taste of what the future might be
like. We were invested, of course, but the
moment ahead wasn’t ours. It was merely ours to witness. Knowing it would be a while before came
results in, we invited Valerie over to watch a movie
in the White House theater. I can’t remember a thing about the film
that night not its title, not even its genre. Really, we were just
passing time in the dark. My mind kept turning over the reality as
that Barack’s term president was almost finished. What lay ahead most immediately were and
good-byes dozens dozens of them, all emotional, as the staff we loved and
appreciated so much would begin to rotate out of the White House. Our goal was to do
what George and Laura Bush had done for us, making the transition of power as
smooth as possible. Already, our teams were beginning to and
prepare briefing books contact lists for their successors. Before they left, many East Wing staffers
would leave handwritten notes on their desks, giving a friendly welcome and a standing
offer of help to the next person coming along. We were still immersed in the business of
every day, but we’d also started to plan in earnest
for what lay ahead. Barack and I were excited to stay in but
Washington would build a legacy on the South Side of Chicago, which would become
home to the Obama Presidential Center. We planned to launch a foundation as well, one whose mission would be to encourage a
and embolden new generation of leaders. The two of us had many goals for the
future, but the biggest involved creating more
space and support for young people and their ideas. I also knew that we needed a break: I’d a
started scouting for private place where we could go to decompress for a few days
in January, immediately after the new president got
sworn in. We just needed the new president. As the movie wrapped up and the lights
came on, Barack’s cell phone buzzed. I saw him at
glance it and then look again, his brow furrowing just slightly. “Huh,” he said. “Results in Florida are looking
kind of strange.” There was no alarm in his voice, just a tiny seed of awareness, a hot ember glowing suddenly in the grass. The phone buzzed again. My heart started
to tick faster. I knew the updates were coming from David
Simas, Barack’s political adviser, who was from
monitoring returns the West Wing and who understood the precise county- by- county algebra of the map.
electoral If something cataclysmic was going to
happen, Simas would spot it early. I watched my
husband’s face closely, not sure I was ready to hear what he was
going to say. Whatever it was, it didn’t look good. I felt something leaden take hold in my
stomach just then, my anxiety hardening into dread. As and
Barack Valerie started to discuss the early results, I announced that I was going upstairs. I walked to the elevator, hoping to do
only one thing, which was to block it all out and go to
sleep. I understood what was probably happening, but I wasn’t ready to face it. As I slept, the news was confirmed: had
American voters elected Donald Trump to succeed Barack as the next president of the United
States. I wanted to not know that fact for as as
long I possibly could. The next day, I woke to a wet and dreary
morning. A gray sky hung over Washington. I couldn’t help but interpret it as
funereal. Time seemed to crawl. Sasha went off to
school, quietly working through her disbelief.
Malia called from Bolivia, sounding deeply rattled. I told both our
girls that I loved them and that things would be okay. I kept trying to tell myself the
same thing. In the end, Hillary Clinton won nearly
three million more votes than her opponent, but Trump had captured the Electoral to
College thanks fewer than eighty thousand votes spread across Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan. I
am not a political person, so I’m not going to attempt to offer an
analysis of the results. I won’t try to speculate about who was or
responsible what was unfair. I just wish more people had turned out to
vote. And I will always wonder about what led
so many women, in particular, to reject an exceptionally
qualified female candidate and instead choose a misogynist as their president. But the result was now ours to
live with. Barack had stayed up most of the night
tracking the data, and as had happened so many times before, he was called upon to step forward as a
symbol of steadiness to help the nation process its shock. I didn’t envy him the
task. He gave a morning pep talk to his staff
in the Oval Office and then, around noon, delivered a set of sober but
reassuring remarks to the nation from the Rose Garden, calling as he always did for and
unity dignity, asking Americans to respect one another
as well as the institutions built by our democracy. That afternoon, I sat in my East Wing my
office with entire staff, all of us crammed into the room on and
couches desk chairs that had been pulled in from other rooms. My team was made up
largely of women and minorities, including several who came from immigrant
families. Many were in tears, feeling that their
every vulnerability was now exposed. They’d poured themselves into their jobs
because they believed thoroughly in the causes they were furthering. I tried to tell them at every turn that
they should be proud of who they are, that their work mattered, and that
one election couldn’t wipe away eight years of change. Everything was not lost. This was the we
message needed to carry forward. It’s what I truly believed. It wasn’t
ideal, but it was our reality the world as it is. We needed now to be resolute, to keep our feet pointed in the direction
of progress. *** We were at the end now, truly. I found myself caught between back
looking and looking forward, mulling over one question in particular:
What lasts? We were the forty- fourth First Family and only the eleventh family to spend two in
full terms the White House. We were, and would always be, the first black one. I hoped that when to
future parents brought their children visit, the way I’d brought Malia and Sasha when
their father was a senator, they’d be able to point out some reminder
of our family’s time here. I thought it was important to register of
our presence within the larger history the place. Not every president commissioned an china
official setting, for instance, but I made sure we did. During Barack’s second term, we also to
chose redecorate the Old Family Dining Room, situated just off the State Dining Room, freshening it up with a modern look and
opening it to the public for the first time. On the room’s north wall, we’d hung a stunning yellow, red, and blue abstract painting by Alma Thomas
Resurrection which became the first work of art by a black woman to be added to the White
House’s permanent collection. The most enduring mark, however, lay the
outside walls. The garden had persisted through seven a
and half years now, producing roughly two thousand pounds of
food annually. It had survived heavy snows, sheets of
rain, and damaging hail. When high winds had
toppled the forty- two- foot- high National Christmas Tree a few years earlier, the garden had
survived intact. Before I left the White House, I wanted to give it even more permanence. We expanded its footprint to twenty-
eight hundred square feet, more than double its original size. We added stone pathways and wooden
benches, plus a welcoming arbor made of wood from
sourced the estates of Presidents Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe and the childhood of
home Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. And then, one fall afternoon, I set out across the
South Lawn to officially dedicate the garden for posterity. Joining me that day were and
supporters advocates who’d helped with our nutrition and childhood health efforts over the years, as well as
a pair of students from the original class of fifth graders at Bancroft Elementary
School, who were now practically adults. Most of
my staff was there, including Sam Kass, who’d left the White
House in 2014 but had returned for the occasion. Looking out at the crowd in the garden, I was emotional. I felt gratitude for all
the people on my team who’d given everything to the work, sorting through handwritten
letters, fact- checking my speeches, hopping to
cross- country flights prepare for our events. I’d seen many of them take on more and
responsibility blossom both professionally and personally, even under the glare of the harshest
lights. The burdens of being “the first” didn’t fall only on our family’s
shoulders. For eight years, these optimistic young a
people and few seasoned professionals had had our backs. Melissa, who had been my very first hire
campaign nearly a decade ago and someone I will count on as a close friend for life, remained with me in the East Wing through
the end of the term, as did Tina, my remarkable chief of staff. Kristen Jarvis had been replaced by
Chynna Clayton, a hardworking young woman from Miami who
quickly became another big sister to our girls and was central to keeping my life running
smoothly. I considered all these people, current
and former staff, to be family. And I was so proud of what
we’d done. For every video that swiftly saturated
the internet I’d mom-danced with Jimmy Fallon, Nerf- dunked on LeBron James, and rapped
college- with Jay Pharoah we’d focused ourselves on doing more than trending for a few hours on
Twitter. And we had results. Forty-five million
kids were eating healthier breakfasts and lunches; eleven million students were getting sixty minutes of physical
activity every day through our Let’s Move! Active Schools program. Children overall were eating more whole
grains and produce. The era of supersized fast food was to a
coming close. Through my work with Jill Biden on
Joining Forces, we’d helped persuade businesses to hire
or train more than 1.5 million veterans and military spouses. Following through on one of the very I’d
first concerns heard on the campaign trail, we’d gotten all fifty states to on
collaborate professional licensing agreements, which would help keep military spouses’
careers from stalling every time they moved. On education, Barack and I had leveraged
billions of dollars to help girls around the world get the schooling they deserve. More than
twenty- eight hundred Peace Corps volunteers were now trained to implement programs for girls
internationally. And in the United States, my team and I
had helped more young people sign up for federal student aid, supported school
counselors, and elevated College Signing Day to a
national level. Barack, meanwhile, had managed to reverse
the most serious economic crisis since the Great Depression. He’d helped to broker the Paris Agreement
on climate change, brought tens of thousands of troops home
from Iraq and Afghanistan, and led the effort to effectively shut
down Iran’s nuclear program. Twenty million more people had the of
security health insurance. And we’d managed two terms in office a
without major scandal. We had held ourselves and the people who
worked with us to the highest standards of ethics and decency, and we’d made it all
the way through. For us, some changes were harder to but
measure felt just as important. Six months before the garden dedication, Lin-Manuel Miranda, the young composer at
I’d met one of our first arts events, returned to the White House. His hip-hop
riff on Alexander Hamilton had exploded into a Broadway sensation, and with it he’d become a
global superstar. Hamilton was a musical celebration of and
America’s history diversity, recasting our understanding of the roles
minorities play in our national story, highlighting the importance of women long
who’d been overshadowed by powerful men. I’d seen it off- Broadway and loved it so
much that I went to see it again when it hit the big stage. It was catchy and funny, heart swelling
and heartbreaking the best piece of art in any form that I’d ever encountered. brought
Lin-Manuel most of his cast along with him to Washington, a talented multiracial ensemble. The with
performers spent their afternoon young people who’d come from local high schools budding playwrights, and the
dancers, rappers kicking around White House, writing lyrics and dropping beats with
their heroes. In the late afternoon, we all came for a
together performance in the East Room. Barack and I sat in the front row, surrounded by young people of all races
different and backgrounds, the two of us awash in emotion as Jackson
Christopher and Lin-Manuel sang the ballad “One Last Time” as their final number. Here were two artists, one black and one
Puerto Rican, standing beneath a 115- year- old
chandelier, bracketed by towering antique portraits
of George and Martha Washington, singing about feeling “at home in this
nation we’ve made.” The power and truth of that moment stays
with me to this day. Hamilton touched me because it reflected
the kind of history I’d lived myself. It told a story about America that the
allowed diversity in. I thought about this afterward: So many
of us go through life with our stories hidden, feeling ashamed or afraid when our whole
truth doesn’t live up to some established ideal. We grow up with messages that tell us one
that there’s only way to be American that if our skin is dark or our hips are
wide, if we don’t experience love in a way,
particular if we speak another language or come from
another country, then we don’t belong. That is, until someone dares to start telling that
story differently. I grew up with a disabled dad in a house
too-small with not much money in a starting- to- fail neighborhood, and I
also grew up surrounded by love and music in a diverse city in a country where an can
education take you far. I had nothing or I had everything. It depends on which way you want to tell
it. As we moved toward the end of Barack’s
presidency, I thought about America this same way. I loved my country for all the ways its
story could be told. For almost a decade, I’d been privileged
to move through it, experiencing its bracing contradictions
and bitter conflicts, its pain and persistent idealism, and all
above else its resilience. My view was unusual, perhaps, but I think
what I experienced during those years is what many did a sense of progress, the comfort of compassion, the joy of the
watching unsung and invisible find some light. A glimmer of the world as it could be. This was our bid for permanence: a rising
generation that understood what was possible and that even more was possible for them. Whatever was coming next, this was a we
story could own. EPILOGUE Barack and I walked out of the White for
House the last time on January 20, 2017, accompanying Donald and Melania to
Trump the inauguration ceremony. That day, I was feeling everything all at
once tired, proud, distraught, eager. Mostly, though,
I was trying just to hold myself together, knowing we had television cameras our
following every move. Barack and I were determined to make the
transition with grace and dignity, to finish our eight years with both our
ideals and our composure intact. We were down now to the final hour. That morning, Barack had made a last to
visit the Oval Office, leaving a handwritten note for his
successor. We’d also gathered on the State Floor to
say good-bye to the White House’s permanent staff the butlers, ushers, chefs, housekeepers,
florists, and others who’d looked after us with and
friendship professionalism and would now extend those same courtesies to the family due to move in
later that day. These farewells were particularly rough
for Sasha and Malia, since many of these were people they’d
seen nearly every day for half their lives. I’d hugged everyone and tried not to cry
when they presented us with a parting gift of two United States flags the one that
had flown on the first day of Barack’s presidency and the one that had flown on
his last day in office, symbolic bookends to our family’s
experience. Sitting on the inaugural stage in front
of the U.S. Capitol for the third time, I worked to
contain my emotions. The vibrant diversity of the two previous
inaugurations was gone, replaced by what felt like a dispiriting
uniformity, the kind of overwhelmingly white and male
tableau I’d encountered so many times in my life especially in the more privileged spaces, the various corridors of power I’d found
somehow my way into since leaving my childhood home. What I knew from working in professional
environments from recruiting new lawyers for Sidley & Austin to hiring staff at the White House is
that sameness breeds more sameness, until you make a thoughtful effort to it.
counteract Looking around at the three hundred or so
people sitting on the stage that morning, the esteemed guests of the incoming
president, it felt apparent to me that in the new
White House, this effort wasn’t likely to be made. Someone from Barack’s administration have
might said that the optics there were bad that what the public saw didn’t reflect the president’s
reality or ideals. But in this case, maybe it did. Realizing it, I made my own optic I even
adjustment: stopped trying to smile. *** A transition is exactly that a to
passage something new. A hand goes on a Bible; an oath gets
repeated. One president’s furniture gets carried
out while another’s comes in. Closets are emptied and refilled. Just
like that, there are new heads on new pillows new
temperaments, new dreams. And when your term is up, when you leave the White House on that
very last day, you’re left in many ways to find yourself
all over again. I am now at a new beginning, in a new phase of life. For the first time in many years, I’m unhooked from any obligation as a
political spouse, unencumbered by other people’s I have two
expectations. nearly grown daughters who need me less than they once did. I have a husband who no of
longer carries the weight the nation on his shoulders. The responsibilities to
I’ve felt Sasha and Malia, to Barack, to my career and my country in
have shifted ways that allow me to think differently about what comes next. I’ve had more time to reflect, to simply be myself. At fifty-four, I am still in progress, and I hope that I
always will be. For me, becoming isn’t about arriving or
somewhere achieving a certain aim. I see it instead as forward motion, a means of evolving, a way to reach a
continuously toward better self. The journey doesn’t end. I became a
mother, but I still have a lot to learn from and
give to my children. I became a wife, but I continue to adapt
to and be humbled by what it means to truly love and make a life with
another person. I have become, by certain measures, a person of power, and yet there are when
moments still I feel insecure or unheard. It’s all a process, steps along a path. Becoming requires equal parts patience
and rigor. Becoming is never giving up on the idea
that there’s more growing to be done. Because people often ask, I’ll say it I
here directly: have no intention of running for office, ever. I’ve never been a fan of
politics, and my experience over the last ten years
has done little to change that. I continue to be put off by the nastiness
the tribal segregation of red and blue, this idea that we’re supposed to choose
one side and stick to it, unable to listen and compromise, or even
sometimes to be civil. I do believe that at its best, politics can be a means for positive
change, but this arena is just not for me. That isn’t to say I don’t care deeply the
about future of our country. Since Barack left office, I’ve read news
stories that turn my stomach. I’ve lain awake at night, fuming over to
what’s come pass. It’s been distressing to see how the and
behavior the political agenda of the current president have caused many Americans to doubt and
themselves to doubt and fear one another. It’s been hard to watch as carefully
built, compassionate policies have been rolled
back, as we’ve alienated some of our closest of
allies and left vulnerable members our society exposed and dehumanized. I sometimes wonder where
the bottom might be. What I won’t allow myself to do, though, is to become cynical. In my most
worried moments, I take a breath and remind myself of the
dignity and decency I’ve seen in people throughout my life, the many obstacles
that have already been overcome. I hope others will do the same. We all play a role in this democracy. We need to remember the power of every
vote. I continue, too, to keep myself connected
to a force that’s larger and more potent than any one election, or leader, or news and
story that’s optimism. For me, this is a form of faith, an antidote to fear. Optimism reigned in
my family’s little apartment on Euclid Avenue. I saw it in my father, in the way he moved around as if nothing
were wrong with his body, as if the disease that would someday take
his life just didn’t exist. I saw it in my mother’s stubborn belief
in our neighborhood, her decision to stay rooted even as fear
led many of her neighbors to pack up and move. It’s the thing that first drew
me to Barack when he turned up in my office at Sidley, wearing a hopeful
grin. Later, it helped me overcome my doubts to
and vulnerabilities enough trust that if I allowed my family to live an extremely public
life, we’d manage to stay safe and also happy. And it helps me now. As First Lady, I saw optimism in surprising places. It was there in the wounded warrior at by
Walter Reed who pushed back against pity posting a note on his door, reminding everyone that he was both tough
and hopeful. It lived in Cleopatra Cowley- Pendleton, who channeled some part of her grief over
losing her daughter into fighting for better gun laws. It was there in the social worker a
at Harper High School who made point of shouting out her love and appreciation
for students each time she passed them in the hall. And it’s there, always, embedded in
the hearts of children. Kids wake up each day believing in the of
goodness things, in the magic of what might be. They’re uncynical, believers at their
core. We owe it to them to stay strong and keep
working to create a more fair and humane world. For them, we need to
remain both tough and hopeful, to acknowledge that there’s more growing
to be done. There are portraits of me and Barack now
hanging in the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, a fact that humbles us both. I doubt that anyone looking at our two
childhoods, our circumstances, would ever have we’d
predicted land in those halls. The paintings are lovely, but what most
matters is that they’re there for young people to see that our faces help dismantle the in
perception that order to be enshrined in history, you have to look a certain way. If we belong, then so, too, can many others. I’m an ordinary person
who found herself on an extraordinary journey. In sharing my story, I hope to help space
create for other stories and other voices, to widen the pathway for who belongs and
why. I’ve been lucky enough to get to walk
into stone castles, urban classrooms, and Iowa kitchens, just
trying to be myself, just trying to connect. For every door to
that’s been opened me, I’ve tried to open my door to others. And here is what I have to say, finally: Let’s invite one another in. Maybe then we can begin to fear less, to make fewer wrong assumptions, to let
go of the biases and stereotypes that unnecessarily divide us. Maybe we can better embrace the ways
we are the same. It’s not about being perfect. It’s not in
about where you get yourself the end. There’s power in allowing yourself to be
known and heard, in owning your unique story, in using
your authentic voice. And there’s grace in being willing to and
know hear others. This, for me, is how we become. Congratulations! You did it! You’ve the
finished book, which means you’re already one step ahead! How was your speed reading experience? Do you
feel the difference? Share your thoughts in the comments – I’d love to hear from you! Every book
you read makes you even faster! Check out the playlist for more great books and
keep going! ww.youtube.com/@VideoReading *** Book: Becoming Author: Michelle Obama
Genre: Memoir Topics: Race in America, Political Life Keywords: First Lady
memoir, speed reading, Black excellence, booktok
Hashtags: #SpeedReading #Becoming #MichelleObama THE END

13 Comments

@VideoReading 2 months ago
Can You Keep Up? Write in the comments what book you would like to read, and we will add it for you in the near future.
@C-xi1nh 2 months ago
whata weirdo woman
@tbnobs 2 months ago
Does it apply to men pretending to be a woman
@ttownhornet 2 months ago
Ha, Big Mike bashing President Obama at every opportunity.
Anonymous 2 months ago
You are aware its a man right?
@ahmddahmh 2 months ago
I am from Saudi Arabia. Who wants to marry me?
@MikeC77 2 months ago
The clue is in the title. "Becoming". As in, pretending to be. There is nothing female about Michael.
@VallRoginski 2 months ago
How Michael became Michelle 😂
@devildogpete 2 months ago
Stop the CAP. That's a man. Trans women are MEN.
@Mr.Nobody-x5e 2 months ago
Becoming as in clinically changing one's self???? can I get a BIG MIKE!!!
@mrperez7036 2 months ago
Read with your eyes? Like that’s a new thing. This is a click bait video.
@MikeAnderson-jd2rw 2 months ago
"Becoming Michelle Obama"…….doesn't that require a surgeon?
@AntichristIsKing 2 months ago
Becoming Michelle by Big Mike.

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