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 refilled our glasses with impossibly sweet tea and urged us to go for seconds and then thirds. As I remember it, we never discussed anything of 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 shoveled in appreciatively, tired as we were of dining-hall food. I saw Aunt Sis simply as a mild-mannered, accommodating older lady, but she was giving us a gift we were still too young to recognize, filling us up with the past—ours, hers, our father’s and grandfather’s—without once 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 from Ohio and a 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 impulsive in ways I 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 car—a 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 alongside a wide field, its high grass stunted and straw-like after the 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 through this 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 floor at Third World Center parties, I was still privately and at all times focused on 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 opened onto the 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 professionally. Kevin, 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—another field to 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 where an 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 another Princeton classmate of ours.
At the time—and unfairly, I think now—I judged him for the swerve. I had no capacity to understand why someone would take an expensive Princeton education and not immediately convert it into the kind of leg up in the world that such a 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—marching to the resolute beat of effort/result, effort/result—a devoted follower of the established path, if only because nobody in my family (aside from Craig) had ever set foot on the path before. I wasn’t particularly imaginative in how I thought about the future, which is another way of saying I was already thinking about law 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 I’d ever made was a 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 after urban kids 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 feel guilty about it for years to come.
This was the same summer, too, when people I loved started to die. Robbie, my great-aunt, my rigid taskmaster of a piano teacher, passed away in June, bequeathing her house on 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 untrustworthy having kept 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 normally felt 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 loved ones—baked ham, Jell-O molds, and casseroles. But Southside himself was gone. It was painful, but time pushed us all forward.
* * *
Each spring, corporate recruiters descended on the Princeton campus, aiming themselves at the graduating seniors. You’d see a classmate who normally dressed in ratty jeans and an untucked shirt crossing campus in a pin-striped suit and understand that he or she was destined for a Manhattan skyscraper. It happened quickly, this vocational sorting—the bankers, lawyers
, doctors, and executives of tomorrow hastily migrating toward their 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 burned-out by school—by the grind of 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 theoretical essence and prided myself on never rolling over in a conflict. Was this not the stuff lawyers were made of? I figured it was.
I can admit now that I was driven not just by logic but by some reflexive wish for other people’s approval, too. When I was a kid, I quietly basked in the warmth that floated my way anytime I announced to a teacher, a neighbor, or one of Robbie’s church-choir friends that I wanted to be a pediatrician. My, isn’t that impressive? their expressions would say, and I reveled in it. Years later, it was really no different. Professors, relatives, random people I met, asked what was 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 squeaked in off 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 problem with caring a 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 discussing the relative merits of exclusionary vertical agreements in 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 circumstance will 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—including the most 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 city where you were born, only now you go to work on the forty-seventh floor in a downtown building with a wide plaza and a sculpture out front. You used to pass by it as a South Side kid riding the bus to 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 yourself out of that bus and across the plaza and onto an upward-moving elevator so silent it seems to glide. You’ve joined the tribe. At the age of twenty-five, you have an assistant. You make more money than 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 school loans and 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 everything ever given to you—the love of your parents, the faith of your teachers, the music from Southside and 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 young lawyers being courted by 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 force of a 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.
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 Side and the high-minded diction of the Ivy League, and now on top of that I spoke Lawyer, too. I’d been hired into the firm’s marketing and intellectual property practice group, which was considered internally more freewheeling and creative than other groups, I suppose because we dealt at least some of the time with advertising. Part of my job involved poring over scripts for our clients’ TV and radio ads, making sure they didn’t violate Federal Communications Commission standards. I would later be awarded the honor of looking after the legal concerns of Barney the Dinosaur. (Yes, this is what passes for freewheeling in a 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 boisterous scrum of 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-humored African American woman several years my 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 with work and careful not to waste one billable minute of the day. Which put me back at my desk, alone with my documents.
If I had to spend seventy hours a 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 summertime were 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 appeared placid and almost toylike, but the reality was in many cases far different. Parts of the South Side had become desolate as businesses shut down and families continued to move out. The steel mills that had once provided stability were cutting thousands of jobs. The crack epidemic, which had ravaged African American communities in places like Detroit and New York, was only just reaching Chicago, but its course was no less destructive. Gangs battled for market share, recruiting young boys to run their street-corner operations, which, while dangerous, was far more lucrative than going to school. The city’s murder rate was starting to tick upward—a 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 living back in my old South Shore neighborhood, which was still relatively untouched by gangs and drugs. My parents had moved downstairs into Robbie and Terry’s old space, and at their invitation I’d taken over the upstairs apartment, where we’d lived when I was a ki
d, sprucing it up with a crisp white couch and framed batik prints on the walls. I wrote my parents an occasional check that loosely covered my 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 downstairs kitchen 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 professional I’d always dreamed of 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 drove me nuts—how I saw it as nothing but hubris.
Barack Obama had already created a stir at the firm. For one thing, he’d just finished his first year of 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 professors at Harvard—the daughter of a managing partner—claimed he was the most gifted law student she’d ever encountered. Some of the secretaries who’d seen the guy come in for his interview were saying that on top of this apparent brilliance he was also cute.
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