Becoming

by Michelle Obama

  I was in Africa now. It was heady, draining, and wholly new to me. Auma’s sky-blue VW was so old that it often needed to be pushed in order to get the engine into gear. I’d ill-advisedly bought new white sneakers to wear on the trip, and within a day, after all the pushing we 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 with the awkwardness of 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 naively believing I’d feel some visceral connection to 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 African American in 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 measure of my frustration, I drew a long emphatic gash across the rest of 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 surfaced usually when one 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 and exploding with such force that I 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 that this is 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 express and 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 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. I sat glued to the window as 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 before nor could hardly have imagined.

  We were on the train for several hours. Barack finally opened a book, but I continued to stare transfixed out the window as the Nairobi slums gave way to jewel-green countryside and the train rattled north to the town of Kisumu, where Auma, Barack, and I disembarked into the broiling equatorial heat and took a last, jackhammering ride on a matatu through the 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 questions for me 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 speak her language. I was bowled over by her easy joy. As evening fell, she butchered us a chicken and made us a stew, which she served with a cornmeal mush called ugali. All the while, neighbors and relatives popped in 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 bright spray 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.

  12

  Barack and I got married on a sunny October Saturday in 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 cousins but also cousins of 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 Whitney Young. 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 played later that day at our reception. Santita Jackson, ebullient in a black dress with a plunging neckline, was my maid of honor. I’d invited old colleagues from Sidley and 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 posse mingled happily with a handful of his Kenyan relatives, who wore brightly colored East African hats. Sadly, we’d lost Gramps—Barack’s grandfather—the previous winter to 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 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 held tightly to Craig’s elbow as he walked me 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 also continuing on.

  Barack had woken up that morning with a nasty head cold, but it had miraculously cleared as soon as he arriv
ed 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 stunning voice, accompanied by a pianist.

  It was a Stevie Wonder tune called “You and I (We Can Conquer the World).” I’d first heard it as a 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 and again with my little-girl lungs. Well, in my mind, we can conquer the world / In love you and I, you and I, you and I…

  I was nine years old at the time. I knew nothing about love and commitment or conquering the world. All I could do was conjure for myself shimmery ideas about what love might be like and who might come along someday to make me feel that strong. Would it be Michael Jackson? José Cardenal from the Cubs? Someone like my 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 during his 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 Jeremiah Wright, 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 what it 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 stood there with 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 somehow mattered to 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 hundred of our witnesses and roll on over to the reception. We’d eat and drink and dance until we’d exhausted ourselves with our 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 drove down 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 ready to kick back. Barack had originally planned to spend the months leading up 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 approached by the 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 enroll black voters ahead of the November elections. It was estimated that about 400,000 African Americans in the state were eligible to 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 drive in Chicago had helped propel Harold Washington into office. In 1992, the stakes again felt high: Another African American candidate, Carol Moseley Braun, had surprised everyone by narrowly winning the 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 similar to what he’d done as a grassroots organizer: Over the course of the spring and summer, he and his staff had tromped through plenty of church basements, gone house to house to talk with unregistered voters. He networked regularly with community leaders and 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 Rubik’s Cube–like puzzle that could be 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 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. The job was broad and people oriented enough to be energizing and almost always interesting. Whereas I’d once spent my 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 inspect fallen trees 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 corporate lawyer did, and for this reason I found it compelling. I was experiencing Chicago in a way I never had before.

  I was learning something else of value, too, spending much of my time in the presence of Susan Sher and Valerie Jarrett, two women who—I was seeing—managed to be both tr
emendously confident and tremendously human at the same time. Susan ran meetings with a steely and unflappable grace. Valerie thought nothing of speaking her mind in a roomful of opinionated men, often managing to deftly bring people around to 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 promoted to 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 each of 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 didn’t second-guess the power in 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 compartmentalization was even a choice for Valerie and Susan, given that they were juggling the expectations unique to mothers and were also both divorced, which came with its own emotional and financial challenges. They weren’t striving for perfect, but managed somehow to 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.