And now I was at Harper, listening to children talking about how to stay alive. I admired their resilience, and I wished desperately that they didn’t need it so much.
One of them then gave me a candid look. “It’s nice that you’re here and all,” he said with a shrug. “But what’re you actually going to do about any of this?”
To them, I represented Washington, D.C., as much as I did the South Side. And when it came to Washington, I felt I owed them the truth.
“Honestly,” I began, “I know you’re dealing with a lot here, but no one’s going to save you anytime soon. Most people in Washington aren’t even trying. A lot of them don’t even know you exist.” I explained to those students that progress is slow, that they couldn’t afford to simply sit and wait for change to come. Many Americans didn’t want their taxes raised, and Congress couldn’t even pass a budget let alone rise above petty partisan bickering, so there weren’t going to be billion-dollar investments in education or magical turnarounds for their community. Even after the horror of Newtown, Congress appeared determined to block any measure that could help keep guns out of the wrong hands, with legislators more interested in collecting campaign donations from the National Rifle Association than they were in protecting kids. Politics was a mess, I said. On this front, I had nothing terribly uplifting or encouraging to say.
I went on, though, to make a different pitch, one that came directly from my South Side self. Use school, I said.
These kids had just spent an hour telling me stories that were tragic and unsettling, but I reminded them that those same stories also showed their persistence, self-reliance, and ability to overcome. I assured them that they already had what it would take to succeed. Here they were, sitting in a school that was offering them a free education, I said, and there were a whole lot of committed and caring adults inside that school who thought they mattered. About six weeks later, thanks to donations from local businesspeople, a group of Harper students would come to the White House, to visit with me and Barack personally, and also spend time at Howard University, learning what college was about. I hoped that they could see themselves getting there.
I will never pretend that words or hugs from a First Lady alone can turn somebody’s life around or that there’s any easy path for students trying to navigate everything that those kids at Harper were dealing with. No story is that simple. And of course, every one of us sitting in the library that day knew this. But I was there to push back against the old and damning narrative about being a black urban kid in America, the one that foretold failure and then hastened its arrival. If I could point out those students’ strengths and give them some glimpse of a way forward, then I would always do it. It was a small difference I could make.
24
In the spring of 2015, Malia announced that she’d been invited to the prom by a boy she kind of liked. She was sixteen then, finishing her junior year at Sidwell. To us, she was still our kid, long-legged and enthusiastic as she’d always been, though every day she seemed to become a little more adult. She was now nearly as tall as I was and starting to think about applying to college. She was a good student, curious and self-possessed, a collector of details much like her dad. She’d become fascinated by films and filmmaking and the previous summer had taken it upon herself to seek out Steven Spielberg one evening when he’d come to the White House for a dinner party, asking him so many questions that he followed up with an offer to let her intern on a TV series he was producing. Our girl was finding her way.
Normally, for security reasons, Malia and Sasha weren’t allowed to ride in anyone else’s car. Malia had a provisional license by then and was able to drive herself around town, though always with agents following in their own vehicle. But still, since moving to Washington at the age of ten, she’d never once ridden a bus or the Metro or been driven by someone who didn’t work for the Secret Service. For prom night, though, we were making an exception.
On the appointed evening, her date arrived in his car, clearing security at the southeast gate of the White House, following the path up and around the South Lawn by which heads of state and other visiting dignitaries normally arrived, and then gamely—bravely—walking into the Dip Room dressed in a black suit.
“Just be cool please, okay?” Malia had said to me and Barack, her embarrassment already beginning to smolder as we rode the elevator downstairs. I was barefoot, and Barack was in flip-flops. Malia wore a long black skirt and an elegant bare-shouldered top. She looked beautiful and about twenty-three years old.
By my reckoning, we did manage to play it cool, though Malia still laughs, remembering it all as a bit excruciating. Barack and I shook the young man’s hand, snapped a few pictures, and gave our daughter a hug before sending them on their way. We took what was perhaps unfair comfort in the knowledge that Malia’s security detail would basically ride the boy’s bumper all the way to the restaurant where they were going for dinner before the dance and would remain on quiet duty throughout the night.
From a parent’s point of view, it wasn’t a bad way to raise teenagers—knowing that a set of watchful adults was trailing them at all times, tasked with extricating them from any sort of emergency. From a teenager’s standpoint, though, this was understandably a complete and total drag. As with many aspects of life in the White House, we were left to sort out what it meant for our family—where and how to draw the lines, how to balance the requirements of the presidency against the needs of two kids learning how to mature on their own.
Once they got to high school, we gave the girls curfews—first 11:00 and eventually midnight—and enforced them, according to Malia and Sasha, with more vigor than many of their friends’ parents did. If I was concerned about their safety or whereabouts, I could always check in with the agents, but I tried not to. It was important to me that the kids trusted their security team. Instead, I did what I think a lot of parents do and relied on a network of other parents for information, all of us pooling what we knew about where the flock of them was going and whether there’d be an adult in charge. Of course, our girls carried extra responsibility by virtue of who their father was, knowing that their screwups could make headlines. Barack and I both recognized how unfair this was. Both of us had pushed boundaries and done dumb things as teenagers, and we’d been fortunate to do it all without the eyes of a nation on us.
Malia had been eight when Barack sat on the edge of her bed in Chicago and asked if she thought it was okay for him to run for president. I think now of how little she’d known at the time, how little any of us could have known. It meant one thing to be a child in the White House. It meant something different to try to emerge from it as an adult. How could Malia have guessed that she’d have men with guns following her to prom someday? Or that people would take photos of her sneaking a cigarette and sell them to gossipy websites?
Our kids were coming of age during what felt like a unique time. Apple had begun selling the iPhone in June 2007, about four months after Barack announced his candidacy for president. A million of them sold in less than three months. A billion of them sold before his second term was over. His was the first presidency of a new era, one involving the disruption and dismantling of all norms around privacy—involving selfies, data hacks, Snapchats, and Kardashians. Our daughters lived more deeply inside it than we did, in part because social media governed teen life and in part because their routines put them in closer contact with the public than ours did. As Malia and Sasha moved around Washington with their friends after school or on weekends, they’d catch sight of strangers pointing their phones in their direction, or contend with grown men and women asking—even demanding—to take a selfie with them. “You do know that I’m a child, right?” Malia would sometimes say when turning someone down.