Michelle Obama

by Peter Slevin

  Robbie was a formidable presence. Always had been. Years before, she had lived with Marian’s large family at 6449 South Eberhart Avenue, helping with the children in ways that, as Marian recalled, “my mother would not or could not.” She became youth choir director at the politically progressive Woodlawn AME church and, in 1943, registered for a church and choral music workshop at Northwestern University. Late on a summer night, when she arrived at Willard Hall to claim her room, a clerk informed her that Negroes were not permitted to spend the night on campus. Although it was nearly midnight, the clerk sent her to a rooming house for “coloreds” elsewhere in Evanston. Robbie reported the news to Woodlawn’s pastor, the Reverend Archibald J. Carey Jr., who mustered a Chicago Defender reporter and an officer of the Chicago Civil Liberties Committee to investigate. “We know that Negroes prefer to live with members of their own race,” a school official told the delegation. Five months later, backed by the Woodlawn church, Robbie sued Northwestern in state court, alleging discrimination. The lawsuit charged that the university had treated her as “inferior to other normal young American women and unfit to live and associate with them.”

  Robbie, who became the Woodlawn choir director, retained her high standards, a trait that ran in the family. “She was friendly, but that music had to be perfect,” remembered Betty Reid, who sang at Woodlawn and rehearsed from time to time at the South Euclid house. “Let me tell you, in the middle of your performance, if you were off-key, she would stop. ‘We are going to start at this place. If you aren’t interested in singing, you should just sit this out.’ We would feel so embarrassed, but she wanted to make sure you never made that error again. She was a hard taskmaster, but the choirs and the performers were right on target.” Reid became a friend, sometimes giving Robbie a ride home from church. Later, Reid would leave Woodlawn and minister to her own congregation. She presided over Fraser’s memorial service in 1991.

  Michelle said both sides of the family had a “strong connection to faith and religion,” although she and Craig were infrequent worshippers as children. They sometimes attended Woodlawn, which was preferred by the Shields family, and sometimes the Baptist church favored by the Robinsons. She remembered enduring the endless Chicago winters with the help of romps in a church basement much larger than the cellar at 7436 South Euclid. As an adult, she said she wanted her own daughters to have “a basic foundation, understanding and respect for [a] higher being … because it’s what I grew up with.” In religious matters as with many other things, Fraser and Marian left it to the children to choose their own way. Their approach, according to Craig, was to expose them to church and encourage them “to explore and find our own basis for faith by thinking for ourselves.” After his father’s funeral years later, Craig noted that Betty Reid’s remarks were not “about how Fraser had gone on to a better place, which would have been counter to his belief that life is what it is, here on earth.”

  THROUGH THE YEARS, Craig and Michelle frequently described their childhood as an idyll rooted in family solidarity that flowed from their parents’ evident affection for each other and their determination to get the parenting equation right. “That love for one another,” Craig wrote, “was simply a fact of our lives, the foundation of the strong family unit they chose to build, and the reason they always seemed to be happy to me—even when circumstances might have dictated otherwise.” Fraser and Marian made clear their rigorous expectations for achievement and citizenship, while deploying a sense of humor that, among other things, kept the children from getting too big for their britches. Craig recalled their parents as “relentless.” Michelle, who remembered “a mother who pushed me,” cleaned the bathroom every Saturday, scrubbing the sink and toilet and mopping the floor. She and her brother took turns doing the dishes. The parents “didn’t overdo the praise,” yet something in the mix kept the children from being overly concerned with the negative opinions of others. “It was very disciplined and there was a lot of accountability,” Craig said. “But there was a whole lot of respect, a whole lot of love, and the biggest thing I think my parents gave us was self-esteem.” They also modeled a sense of responsibility, to oneself and others, that would be echoed in countless choices Michelle made as an adult.

  The freedom granted to Michelle and Craig to make their own decisions was not unlimited. It existed within a framework that emphasized hard work, honesty, and self-discipline. There were obligations and occasional punishment. But the goal was freethinking. “Don’t be a follower,” Marian told her children. “You follow people for one reason and they’ll lead you for another.” She advised them to use their heads, yet not to be afraid to make mistakes—in each case always learning from what goes wrong. “If it sounds like they are using good judgment,” she said, “then you don’t settle on the rules, because you want them early on to start making decisions on their own. I think that gives kids a lot of confidence.”

  The highs and lows of Marian’s own childhood taught her some enduring lessons, ones that she would pass along. She attended segregated schools. In her extended family, she saw struggle and sacrifice alike. “That’s where we got our understanding that it was going to be hard, but you just had to do whatever it takes,” she said. “We all went to church. I was a Brownie. I was a Girl Scout. We all took piano lessons. We had drama classes. They took you to the museum, the Art Institute. They did all these things, but I don’t know how.” She saw to it that Craig and Michelle went to the symphony, the opera, and the city’s fine museums. Recalling times in her childhood when she “resented it when I couldn’t say what I felt,” she also aimed to raise her children to stand up, speak up, and always ask why. “More important, even, than learning to read and write was to teach them to think. We told them, ‘Make sure you respect your teachers, but don’t hesitate to question them. Don’t even allow us to just say anything to you.’ ”

  It was understood in the Robinson household that no matter what obstacles Michelle or Craig faced because of their race or their working-class roots, life’s possibilities were unbounded. Fulfillment of those possibilities was up to them. No excuses. Not that the strategy emerged fully formed when the kids were born. Marian said she raised her children “by ear, day by day.” She explained, “You know, we always tried to look at things like we might not be right. I learned a lot from my kids simply because I didn’t pretend to act like I knew everything, and my husband was good at that, too. Kids can be smart if you let them; they can think on their own.”

  From the Robinsons’ vantage point on the South Side in the 1960s and 1970s, prejudice and opportunity existed side by side. Amid the undeniable perils, Marian and Fraser recognized that their children would inhabit a world of greater possibility than the one that had greeted their own coming of age a generation earlier. They calculated that a black child stepping into the tumult of modern urban America would find a certain independence of mind to be not just an asset, but a necessity.

  THREE

  Destiny Not Yet Written

  Fraser and Marian Robinson mastered the art of the Sunday drive, a form of entertainment that matched their budget and not incidentally furthered their educational goals for their children. In the early 1970s, gas was affordable and the city beckoned in all of its complexity. When they had time, the family would pile into the Buick Electra 225—Fraser called it the “deuce and a quarter”—and meander through Chicago neighborhoods as the children asked questions and Fraser told stories. With Fraser at the wheel and the children in the back seat, Marian would sit with her back against the passenger door to watch her family as the conversation unfolded. Michelle’s exploration of the wider world began on those drives and would continue on neighborhood bicycle rides, treks across town to high school, summer trips across state lines, and, one day, airplane flights to the East Coast to attend university. Fraser was a devoted reader of books and newspapers, as was Marian, and he was the keeper of the family lore. As he drove, he connected the scenes spooling beyond the windows with stories and
wisdom he kept stashed in his head, drawing on his own experiences and his long, solitary hours tending the equipment that kept the city’s tap water flowing. Craig Robinson, who loved hearing stories about the family, remembered the Sunday drives as important moments in the children’s consideration of life beyond the relative comfort and neighborliness of South Shore.

  In 1974, when Craig was twelve and Michelle was ten, one expedition led the Robinsons to a neighborhood lined with mansions. Craig asked why so many of the homes had an extra little house in the back. “My parents explained that those were carriage houses where black folks who took care of the family stayed,” he recalled. “Thus began a conversation about racism and classism, integration and segregation, along with the history of slavery and Jim Crow.” In South Shore by this time, there were few white residents and the children encountered few white people on their daily rounds. If they experienced animosity in those early years, it was likely from African American kids who heard their good grammar, saw their classroom diligence, and accused them of “trying to sound white.” On that particular Sunday drive, the children wanted to know why some kids, black and white, were judgmental and mean. Marian remarked that meanness often stemmed from insecurity. Fraser said it was important to understand the nature of ignorance instead of dismissing it without reflection. The antidote to meanness was self-knowledge. No one can make you feel bad, they said, if your values are solid and you feel good about yourself. “When you grow up as a black kid in a white world, so many times people are telling you—sometimes not maliciously, sometimes maliciously—you’re not good enough,” Craig said later. “I remember [my father] saying you don’t want to do things because you’re worried about people thinking they’re right; you want to do the right things. You grow up not worrying about what people think about you.”

  The national debate about racism was intense in the early 1970s, thanks, on the positive side, to the civil rights movement and, on the negative, to Republican president Richard Nixon’s adoption of a race-baiting “Southern strategy.” Opportunities for African Americans were unquestionably growing. Legalized discrimination was ebbing, aided by federal law, and the “firsts” were piling up, even if the few exceptions continued to prove the rule. Yet obstacles aplenty remained. In Chicago, the world of young African Americans was different in degree, but not in kind, from the city their parents had known in their youth. The lessons they heard—grounded in education, personal responsibility, and self-esteem—emerged from the experience of the generations that preceded them, including the ones that had flowed north during the Great Migration. For Michelle and Craig, that meant wisdom imparted by Fraser and Marian, but also by their four grandparents and a sprawling extended family on the South Side. Fraser was one of five children, Marian one of seven. It required considerable concentration simply to name all the cousins.

  Purnell Shields, Michelle’s maternal grandfather, was the jazz lover called Southside. He was lively, a good cook, and a master of barbecue whose home became “the headquarters for every special occasion,” Michelle said. Beyond birthdays, holidays, and his annual Fourth of July extravaganza, she recalled visiting frequently, “packed into his little house, eating those ribs for dinner, talking and laughing, listening to jazz, playing cards late into the night. And then, when we could barely keep our eyes open, Southside would jump up and ask, ‘Anybody want cheeseburgers and milkshakes?’ He didn’t want us to leave.” One of Purnell’s most memorable messages, said his daughter Grace Hale, came the day she arrived home in tears and told her father that other children did not like her. “They might not like you, but you need to make sure they respect you. Always work to get respect outside, but get your love at home,” he replied, adding, “Don’t ever come to me again with something so unimportant.” Michelle’s maternal grandmother, Rebecca Shields, was a model of a different sort. She raised her children, then returned to school in her fifties to become a licensed practical nurse, learning to speak French along the way. “Very smart, but very quiet,” Hale recalled. “Sometimes you didn’t even know she was in the room.”

  Michelle owed her middle name to her paternal grandmother, LaVaughn Robinson, who was formidable in her own way, becoming the first African American woman to manage a Moody Bible Institute store. When customers were scarce, she chose sections of scripture and prayed with her fellow workers. “She had very strong values,” said store clerk Jacquelyn Thomas, who reported to her. “She would tell us how we should dress, how we should carry ourselves as Christian young women.” Thomas considered her “a beautiful lady,” and yet felt troubled by the way LaVaughn treated her. “I used to think she was picking on me. The other girl, she didn’t make her do the things she made me do. I would go home and pray on it.” But the teaching and prodding made sense after LaVaughn announced that she was moving, reluctantly, to South Carolina following Fraser’s retirement. It turned out that she wanted Thomas to succeed her and had been preparing her for the role.

  Yet no one carved a stronger profile in the family than LaVaughn’s husband, Fraser C. Robinson Jr., who delivered acerbic lessons in nonsense avoidance to his grandchildren whenever they visited. If he had been born white, Michelle once said, he would have been a bank president. Despite his teenage aspirations in South Carolina in the 1920s, he retired fifty years later from the Chicago workforce as a post office employee, his dreams unfulfilled. Michelle saw “a discontent about him.” Even Craig, who tended to look on the bright side, described him as “scowling” and “very stern.” He said the crusty grandfather they called Dandy was “not always enjoyable to be around.” Fraser was, however, punctilious in all things. “As precise as a drill sergeant when it came to the use of the English language,” Craig said. He liked to use unfamiliar words. If the children did not recognize them, he would send them to the dictionary. “On one visit,” Craig recalled, “I went to greet him and as soon as I said hello, Grandpa barked, ‘Well, that was perfunctory!’ … Sure enough, before I could respond, he asked, ‘Do you know what perfunctory means?’ ‘No, I don’t know.’ ‘Then go look it up!’ … But then he smiled, which was not only shocking, since it was so rare, but also made me wonder if it made him happy to use a word we didn’t know.” Years later, when Craig coached basketball at Oregon State University, his players found a dictionary permanently positioned in the locker room.

  Fraser Jr. was fiercely disciplined and famously tight with a nickel, recalled his nephew, Capers Funnye, born in 1952. To borrow money from him was to invite a lecture about responsibility. “His whole demeanor was that men have to be responsible.” Fraser’s own record, of course, was mixed. He had left LaVaughn and his two young boys on their own for many years, although when he returned to the family, he stayed for good. “He was wrestling with something that you and I would never be able to understand,” reported his second son, Nomenee, who said he made it through college and graduate school without his father’s help, drawing on scholarships, summer jobs, and other sources of money, including loans from his brother Fraser. His father did not show up for Fraser’s graduation from DuSable High, Nomenee’s graduation from Hyde Park High, where he was a top student, or his college commencement. Younger brother Andrew said his father “didn’t exactly spew love or anything. Everything was his way or no way or the highway.” This was true no matter how grand the success. “When I was at my ballgames and winning awards at the Museum of Science and Industry for my drawings, he wouldn’t come or say anything. When I was quarterback in the city championship, he didn’t come. We had to do it on our own.”

  Nomenee went to India with the Peace Corps, where a 1962 photograph in The New York Times showed him meeting Jacqueline Kennedy. He later worked for the federal Office of Economic Opportunity and, in 1971, graduated from Harvard Business School. To his surprise, his father broke with precedent and traveled to Cambridge for the commencement ceremony. After his father’s death in 1996, Nomenee discovered among his father’s papers a folder marked EENEMON—his name spelled backwar
d. In the folder was a thick stack of newspaper stories that mentioned his son, whose achievements had drawn local attention. The family found something else that stunned them: the frugal soul who refused to pay for his sons’ college education had died a prosperous man, leaving a six-figure sum to LaVaughn.

  FRASER JR. ALSO DRUMMED into the grandchildren a larger message fundamental to their upbringing, one that Fraser III and Marian and countless other African American parents perfected in the 1960s. The message was rooted in a paradox that required elders to hold two seemingly contradictory ideas in mind simultaneously. One was the fact that the playing field was tilted away from their children because of their race and class. The other was the conviction that a combination of love, support, perseverance, and upright living could win out. Michelle sketched the juxtaposition in a speech to a largely black audience in South Carolina during the first presidential campaign. On the one hand, she spoke of the “veil of impossibility that keeps us down and keeps our children down—keeps us waiting and hoping for a turn that may never come. It’s the bitter legacy of racism and discrimination and oppression in this country.” On the other, she said her grandfather Fraser “filled my brother and me with big dreams about the lives we could lead. He taught me that my destiny had not been written before I was born—that my destiny was in my hands.”