Becoming: Chapters 9–13

His money went largely toward books, which to him were like sacred objects, providing ballast for his mind.

Still concerned about propriety, I insisted we keep our blooming relationship out of sight of our colleagues, though it hardly worked.

As an organizer working in urban communities, Barack had told me, he’d contended most often with a deep weariness in people—especially black people—a cynicism bred from a thousand small disappointments over time.

We’d just spent the whole summer talking. I wasn’t going to relegate our love to the creeping pace of the postal service.

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.

In meetings on recruitment, I argued insistently—and I’m sure brazenly, in some people’s opinion—that the firm cast a wider net when it came to finding young talent.

If we were serious about bringing in minority lawyers, I asserted, we’d have to look more holistically at 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

How lonely it must have been to live twenty-some years with such a disease, to persist without complaint as your body is slowly and inexorably consumed.

Barack had experienced marriage as ephemeral: His mother had married twice, divorced twice, and in each instance managed to move on with her life, career, and young children intact.

He saw marriage as the loving alignment of two people who could lead parallel lives but without forgoing any independent dreams or ambitions.

We sat for what felt like a long time, blubbering until we were exhausted and out of tears. My mother, who hadn’t said much all day, finally offered a comment.
“Look at us,” she said, a little ruefully.

Washington was a voluble politician with an exuberant spirit.

Most important, he had a distaste for the entrenched Democratic machinery that had long governed Chicago, awarding lucrative city contracts to political donors and generally keeping blacks in service to the party but rarely allowing them to advance into official elected roles.

In a move many African Americans saw as a swift and demoralizing return to the old white ways of Chicago politics, voters went on to elect Richard M. Daley, the son of a previous mayor, Richard J. Daley, who was broadly considered the godfather of Chicago’s famous cronyism.

I was far more excited about the prospect of my brother taking his wedding vows, in other words, than I was about reviewing what constituted a tort.

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 student and bored by subjects that struck me as esoteric and far removed from real life.

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.

Sitting by a window in a cabin packed with Kenyans, some of whom were traveling with live chickens in baskets, others with hefty pieces of furniture they’d bought in the city, I was again struck by how strange my girl-from-Chicago, lawyer-at-a-desk life had suddenly become—how 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.

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.

Santita Jackson, ebullient in a black dress with a plunging neckline, was my maid of honor.

We were surrounded by love—the eclectic, multicultural Obama kind and the anchoring Robinsons-from-the-South-Side kind, all of it now interwoven visibly, pew to pew, inside the church.

I’d spent a year now working with Valerie in the mayor’s office, acting as a liaison to several of the city’s departments, including Health and Human Services.

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.

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 stresses at home and more ready to pour a glass of wine, switch my brain off, and watch TV on the couch.

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.

If you grew up in the 1960s and 1970s as I did, wives seemed to be a genus of white women who lived inside television sitcoms—cheery, coiffed, corseted.

If you grew up in the 1960s and 1970s as I did, wives seemed to be a genus of white women who lived inside television sitcoms—cheery, coiffed, corseted.

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.

Back in Washington, D.C., the Public Allies founders had mustered a fledgling class of fifteen Allies who were working in various organizations around the city.

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 student loans to pay off or perhaps had an inheritance to someday look forward to and thus weren’t worried about saving for the future.

The organization’s leaders were almost disbelieving when I informed them how much I’d borrowed in order to get through school and what that translated to in terms of monthly debt, but they gamely went out and secured new funding that enabled me to come on board.

We knocked on doors in the Cabrini-Green housing project, went to community meetings, and canvassed programs that worked with single mothers.

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.

But ahead of these always came another question, posed by Barack himself, preliminary and supposedly preemptive when it came to running for office of any sort.

Some would ultimately pass, but most would get quickly picked off in the Republican-controlled chamber, downed by partisanship and a cynicism passed off as practicality among his new colleagues.

We were inordinately lucky that my university health insurance would cover most of the bill.

He was doting and invested, my husband, doing what he could do.

I was the process, indivisible from this small, burgeoning life that was now throwing elbows and poking my bladder with her heel.

I love how the sky stays light right into evening, how Lake Michigan gets busy with sailboats and the heat ratchets up to the point that it’s almost impossible to recall the struggles of winter.