They actually weren't the only two African Americans at the firm, though there weren't many in their positions. She was right that people would have noticed. But why did she suddenly care so much about what other people thought about her personal life? What was behind that vague word, "tacky," that she used to dismiss the idea? That was not a word she'd have used to describe any other two African Americans who were dating. She wouldn't even have thought it if Barack had been dating someone else at the firm.
It may have been something more than her usual instinct to stay free from relationships. Professionally, she was still a rarity: a female African American graduate of Harvard Law. She knew from experience that to be effective she needed to keep clients and colleagues focused on the part of her that was a lawyer. This was something her white female colleagues also had to do. For Michelle it went double.
Barack didn't give up asking for a date. Michelle resisted, but not because she wasn't interested. She made a "proclamation" to her mother: "I'm not worrying about dating ... I'm going to focus on me." Right.
She tried to deflect him by setting him up with her friends. He wasn't interested. She wasn't very disappointed.
Having fooled herself, Michelle thought she was doing a good job of hiding her feelings from everyone. But one of her colleagues, Mary Carragher, told biographer Liza Mundy that the courtship looked a little different from the outside. A few times Carragher would go to Michelle's office in the late afternoon and see Barack inside, sitting on the corner of Michelle's desk while he and Michelle were having a conversation that obviously wasn't about business. From the doorway, she could see that Michelle, usually so focused, had finally encountered a distraction she liked. You know what, Carragher would think before knocking, I'm going back to my office. After each of these conversations, Carragher told Mundy, Michelle would mention to Carragher something new she'd just learned about Barack. "She had all these little facts about him," Carragher said. She remembered Michelle's amazement when telling Carragher, "I can't believe he's got a white grandmother from Kansas!"
"She was falling hard," Carragher told Mundy, "But always cool." In his memoir The Audacity of Hope, Barack recalled that it was hard to melt the ice. He was only at Sidley for the summer, so he didn't think much of Michelle's excuse that she was his adviser. "Come on," he said to her. "What advice are you giving me? You're showing me how the copy machine works. You're telling me which restaurants to try. I don't think the partners will consider one date a serious breach of firm policy." When she kept refusing, he said, "OK, I'll quit [the firm]. How's that? You're my adviser. Tell me who I have to talk to."
The more interested Michelle became, the more careful she was. He was going back to Massachusetts at the end of the summer to finish law school, right? Then no, thank you. But she could resist only so much. "Eventually, I wore her down," Barack wrote. "After a firm picnic, she drove me back to my apartment and I offered to buy her an ice cream at the Baskin-Robbins store across the street." It turned into an unplanned date. "We sat on the curb and ate our ice creams in the sticky afternoon heat, and I told her about working at Baskin-Robbins when I was a teenager and how it was hard to look cool in a brown apron and cap. She told me that for a span of two or three years as a child, she had refused to eat anything except peanut butter and jelly. I asked if I could kiss her."
There were secret dates afterward—and at least one that wasn't secret. They bumped into a colleague at a movie theater. Michelle was embarrassed. But with friends outside of the law firm, she could finally open up. She called a friend from Harvard Law School, Verna Williams, to give her the news. "Guess what?" Michelle said. "I've got this great guy in my life. His name is Barack." She told Williams how it had happened, and she mentioned all the details about Barack that fascinated her. "It was clear she was pretty crazy about him." Williams remembered.
"HE WON'T BE AROUND FOR LONG"
With her family, Michelle didn't gush about Barack. She didn't share with them the things she had learned about his family, and his childhood in Hawaii and Indonesia, and his reputation at Harvard Law School. Almost shyly, she brought him to her parents' house for a family dinner. She was also setting him up to be tested. She wasn't going to sell him to her family beforehand. He had to present himself. Of course, if they didn't like him, that would be the end.
But her family had been through this before, so they had sympathy for Barack. "First impression was that he was smart, easygoing, good sense of humor," Craig remembered. "I thought, 'Too bad he won't be around for long.'" As he recalls, his parents felt the same way. "We gave it a month, tops. Not because there was anything wrong with him ... but we knew he was going to do something wrong, and then it was going to be too bad for him."
They weren't worried that Michelle might lose something special. Barack's unusual background and his education might have interested them, but Barack didn't talk about himself. They had no idea he had a white mother, and they wouldn't know for a long time. It wasn't a secret. He just never mentioned it. They didn't hear that he planned to run for a prestigious position at Harvard Law School, editor of the Harvard Law Review, which surely would have interested all of them. So Michelle's family, who assumed they'd never see him again, didn't take any special interest in him. Final verdict after the dinner? "He was just another one who wasn't going to make it."
Then, about a month after the dinner, Craig got a call from Michelle. She wanted a favor. It was about Barack. Craig was surprised Barack was still around. But what did she want?
"My father and I had a theory that you can really tell what somebody's personality is like by playing basketball with him," Craig remembered. Is he generous with his passes? Does he take the shot when it's his? Is he a show-off? Does he lie about fouling or being fouled? Can you trust him to keep score? Michelle wanted Craig to invite Barack to play basketball and then give her his opinion of Barack's character.
Craig's first thought was, "Oh, no, she's going to make me be the bad guy." But he went along with it. He invited Barack to an informal game.
Barack got some credit just for showing up. After starring for Princeton, Craig had been drafted in the fourth round by the Philadelphia 76ers and then had played professionally in Europe. Pickup games with Craig were serious. Craig was also 6'6" to Barack's 6'2", and Craig ran with other big players. Many years later, in 2001, when Michael Jordan was preparing for a possible comeback with the Washington Wizards, Craig was one of the players chosen for secret practice games to tune up the superstar. Craig was almost forty years old then. When he played Barack, he was closer to twenty-seven. Barack hadn't played organized basketball since high school. He was pretty good then—though maybe not as good as he imagined at the time.
They met at a school. Barack and Craig were on the same team. Craig saw that Barack was left-handed, and knew how to pick spots on the court where that was an advantage. Okay, Craig thought. Smart. Barack couldn't easily drive to basket against Craig's bigger friends, but he had an outside shot. That took some practice. Just as Michelle had hoped, Craig got a sense of Barack's character. "I was happy to report back he was a good guy on the court," Robinson told the Providence Journal many years later, when millions more people were wondering what personality traits Barack had revealed that day. "He was confident without being cocky. He was intense. He wanted to win. If he thought a call needed to be argued, he'd argue, but mostly he just played with a lot of integrity. And he didn't just pass the ball to me because I was Michelle's brother."
Craig came away from the game a lot more interested in Barack, who in his own quiet way showed a stronger character than Craig had expected. His parents soon felt the same way. "My sister is one tough girl," Craig remembered. "I'm older and I'm still afraid of her. She's very accomplished, so she needs someone as accomplished as her, and she also needs someone who can stand up to her. So, we in the family, we were just hoping that she could hang on to this guy, because it was readily apparent he could stand up to her."
"THEN AND THERE, I DECIDED"
Barack knew how to get through to Michelle. Some of their dates were unconventional, like when he took her to church basements for community meetings he had organized. But he was able to show off a side of himself that he knew she'd admire. "He connected with me and everyone in that church basement," she remembered. "He was able to articulate a vision that resonated with people, that was real. And right then and there, I decided this guy was special. The authenticity you see is real, and that's why I fell in love with him." Although she was focused on earning a living, she admired Barack's lack of interest in money. "He could've gone to Wall Street. Those offers were available to him. But instead Barack bussed these young mothers down to City Hall to help them find their voice and advocate for change." She also loved his ability to stay hopeful that his work was worth it. "He talked about the simple notion that we as Americans understand the world as it is—and it is a world sometimes that is disappointing and unfair—but our job as American citizens is to work toward building the world as it should be."
Barack also understood a different side of her than anyone else did—even her family. He wrote in The Audacity of Hope, "There was a glimmer that danced across her round, dark eyes whenever I looked at her, the slightest hint of uncertainty, as if, deep inside, she knew how fragile things really were, and that if she ever let go, even for a moment, all her plans might quickly unravel."
She needed someone who saw past the tough exterior to that part of her. Barack was the first. Much later, Craig, who might have known her better than anyone, said he was surprised by that insight.
But at the end of the summer, Barack had to return to Cambridge, Massachusetts, for his second year of Harvard Law School. Could the relationship survive the distance? There would be another year after that before he was finished. For him, a long-distance relationship would be something new.
He knew Michelle was worth it, and the relationship lasted. But these two strong personalities had different ideas about where it was leading. Michelle recalled to New Yorker reporter Lauren Collins, "We would have this running debate throughout our relationship about whether marriage was necessary. It was sort of a bone of contention, because I was, like, 'Look, buddy, I'm not one of these who'll just hang out forever.' You know, that's just not who I am." But Barack wasn't easily pushed, Michelle remembered. He'd say, "'Marriage, it doesn't mean anything, it's really how you feel.' And I was, like, 'Yeah, right.'"
They dated for three years. Michelle had just about had enough when Barack took her out to a dinner at a luxurious restaurant in Chicago. It was supposed to be a celebration of his passing the bar exam, so he could practice law in Illinois. Naturally, the question came up: Law school's done, so now what? He was a little vague, and toward the end of the meal he began to repeat all the same old arguments against marriage. "He got me into one of these discussions again," she remembered. She was "fired up," and he was "blah blah blah blah" with his ideas that a piece of paper didn't make a difference.
That was it. She'd waited long enough for him to come around. But just as she was about to tell him, she was interrupted by the waiter: "Dessert comes out, the tray comes out, and there's a ring!"
The were married in October 1992. The wedding was almost as Michelle had always imagined it, and it was almost a perfect day. Almost. Someone she'd always thought would be there, maybe the person she counted on the most, wasn't there. As happy as she was on her wedding day, a loss had already begun to change her life in ways would that shock some of the people who knew her best.
7. WHERE THE HEART IS
In 1991, about a year and a half before Michelle and Barack were married, Michelle's father died. He was just fifty-five years old. He'd had surgery for a kidney operation, and there were complications.
Michelle was shattered. Although she had worried about his health for as long as she could remember, she wasn't prepared for his sudden death at such a young age.
In his memoir The Audacity of Hope, Barack recalled flying back to Chicago for the funeral and holding Michelle as the casket was lowered. Right then, he made a silent promise to Fraser to take care of Michelle.
She would need his help. She had already been shaken the year before by the death of one of her closest friends, who had died of cancer at just twenty-five.
CONSUMING PASSIONS
Suzanne Alele had been a classmate at Princeton, where she'd arrived after a childhood as varied as Barack's: Born in Nigeria, raised in Jamaica and then Washington, D.C., she was both an athelete and a computer geek. She was less serious than Michelle, and she often told Michelle to relax about the future and enjoy herself more. Although her example hadn't been enough to draw Michelle off the academic path, Michelle was tempted.
Michelle was at Alele's bedside when her friend passed away. The experience caused Michelle to think about her friend's attitude toward life, and how it differed from her own. She asked herself, "If I died in four months, is this how I would have wanted to spend this time? I started thinking about the fact that I went to some of the best schools in the country and I have no idea what I want[ed] to do." She suddenly understood that her pursuit of excellence at Princeton and Harvard had narrowed her life, not widened it. She explained to reporter Richard Wolffe, "You can make money and have a nice degree. But what are you learning about giving back to the world, and finding your passion and letting that guide you, as opposed to the school you got into?"
She was about to walk away from certain success. A senior lawyer at her law firm later said that if she had stayed with the firm "she would have been a superstar." But, Michelle recalled, "I looked out at my neighborhood and sort of had an epiphany that I had to bring my skills to bear in the place that made me," she later told the New York Times. "I wanted to have a career motivated by passion and not just money."
The problem was, money makes a difference when you owe a lot of it, and Michelle did. The student loans from Princeton and Harvard weighed heavily on her. But worrying too much about money also felt wrong to her. As she put it years later, she didn't want to roll up to the family reunion in a Mercedes-Benz.
Barack's influence tipped the balance. He has never been as practical as Michelle, so it was easy for him to tell her to follow her heart. Money? He didn't notice it when he had it. His car at the time had a rust hole on the passenger side that was so big Michelle could see the street go by. Later, when he was a state senator, he would put government expenses on personal credit cards and forget to ask for repayment.
Michelle's family, however, wasn't so casual. Her father was still alive at the time, and he asked, "Don't you want to pay your student loans?" Her college roommate Angela Acree could barely believe what Michelle was planning to do. "I'm sure at Sidley she made more money than her parents ever made," Acree recalled. "It just seemed incredible at the time that she'd leave."
But along with pushing Michelle toward academic success, her parents had taught her to do what would make her happy. She was following that advice.
She was also following the example of people who'd helped create opportunities for her, like the activists who had pushed Chicago in the 1960s from the era of "Willis Wagon" portable classrooms to high schools like Whitney M. Young. She told Mary Mitchell of the Chicago Sun-Times, "I did exactly what leaders in my community told me to do. They said do your best in school, work hard, study, get into the best schools you can get into and when you do that, baby, you bring that education back and you work in your communities."
Michelle wrote to several charities and government agencies. One letter was passed along to Valerie Jarrett, deputy chief of staff to Chicago mayor Richard M. Daley.
The mayor was the son of the Richard J. Daley, who had run the city's Democratic political machine during Michelle's childhood. Michelle didn't have good memories of that. Her father's experiences as a precinct captain had made the whole family suspicious of politicians. The first Daley had fought to keep African Americans in small neighborhoods and poor schools
.
But Michelle went to an interview with Jarrett anyway. They liked each other instantly. Instead of lasting for a polite fifteen minutes, the interview went on for an hour and a half. They learned about each other. Jarrett's background and experience were fascinating. She was born in Iran, where her American father, a doctor, was running a children's hospital. As a child she lived in London before the family moved back to Chicago. Her father, grandfather, and great-grandfather all broke barriers for African Americans. Jarrett had become a lawyer and then ahd devoted herself to public service. Michelle could see that Jarrett didn't believe in old-style Chicago politics.
Jarrett could also see that Michelle would be a huge help to the city. "I offered her a job at the end of the interview," Jarrett remembered, "which was totally inappropriate since it was the mayor's decision. She was so confident and committed and extremely open."
Michelle didn't accept right away. Because Barack shared her doubts about city hall, she asked Jarrett to meet with Barack. Jarrett convinced him. In fact, she later became one of his closest advisers.
Michelle was put in charge of simplifying and solving any problems that businesses and citizens were having with city hall. There was a lot less money than she'd been earning at Sidley, but there was more satisfaction. She then became assistant commissioner of planning and development. That job let her focus on solving the problems with Chicago neighborhoods that had led to conflict in the city when she was growing up.
"SHE BUILT IT TO LAST"
About a year and a half after joining the mayor's office, Michelle got another opportunity. A charity called Public Allies, which had been founded the year before in Washington, D.C., had chosen Chicago as the location of its second office. (It now has almost twenty.) With a combination of volunteer work and education, Public Allies develops young people who want to become community service leaders. The Washington staff had heard of Barack's reputation as a community organizer and wanted him to run the Chicago office. He told them the person they really needed was Michelle. They were soon happy he did.
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