I tried to think back and remember how it was that my life had forked away from the predictable, control-freak fantasy existence I’d envisioned for myself—the one with the steady salary, a house to live in forever, a routine to my days. At what point had I chosen away from that? When had I allowed the chaos inside? Had it been on the summer night when I lowered my ice cream cone and leaned in to kiss Barack for the first time? Was it the day I’d finally walked away from my orderly piles of documents and my partner-track career in law, convinced I’d find something more fulfilling?
My mind sometimes landed back in the church basement in Roseland, on the Far South Side of Chicago, where I’d gone twenty-five years earlier to be with Barack as he spoke to a neighborhood group that was struggling to push back against hopelessness and indifference. Listening to the conversation that evening, I’d heard something familiar articulated in a new way. It was possible, I knew, to live on two planes at once—to have one’s feet planted in reality but pointed in the direction of progress. It was what I’d done as a kid on Euclid Avenue, what my family—and marginalized people more generally—had always done. You got somewhere by building that better reality, if at first only in your own mind. Or as Barack had put it that night, you may live in the world as it is, but you can still work to create the world as it should be.
I’d known the guy for only a couple of months then, but in retrospect I see now that this was my swerve. In that moment, without saying a word, I’d signed on for a lifetime of us, and a lifetime of this.
All these years later, I was thankful for the progress I saw. In 2015, I was still making visits to Walter Reed, but each time it seemed there were fewer wounded warriors to visit. The United States had fewer service members at risk overseas, fewer injuries needing care, fewer mothers with their hearts broken. This, to me, was progress.
Progress was the Centers for Disease Control reporting that childhood obesity rates appeared to be leveling off, particularly among children ages two to five. It was two thousand high school students in Detroit showing up to help me celebrate College Signing Day, a holiday we’d helped expand as a part of Reach Higher, to mark the day when young people committed to their colleges. Progress was the Supreme Court’s decision to reject a challenge to a key part of the country’s new health-care law, all but ensuring that Barack’s signature domestic achievement—the security of health insurance for every American—would remain strong and intact once he left office. It was an economy that had been hemorrhaging 800,000 jobs a month when Barack entered the White House having now racked up nearly five straight years of continuous job growth.
I took this all in as evidence that as a country we were capable of building a better reality. But still, we lived in the world as it is.
A year and a half after Newtown, Congress had passed not a single gun-control measure. Bin Laden was gone, but ISIS had arrived. The homicide rate in Chicago was going up rather than down. A black teen named Michael Brown was shot by a cop in Ferguson, Missouri, his body left in the middle of the road for hours. A black teen named Laquan McDonald was shot sixteen times by police in Chicago, including nine times in the back. A black boy named Tamir Rice was shot dead by police in Cleveland while playing with a toy gun. A black man named Freddie Gray died after being neglected in police custody in Baltimore. A black man named Eric Garner was killed by police after being put in a choke hold during his arrest on Staten Island. All this was evidence of something pernicious and unchanging in America. When Barack was first elected, various commentators had naively declared that our country was entering a “postracial” era, in which skin color would no longer matter. Here was proof of how wrong they’d been. As Americans obsessed over the threat of terrorism, many were overlooking the racism and tribalism that were tearing our nation apart.
Late in June 2015, Barack and I flew to Charleston, South Carolina, to sit with another grieving community—this time at the funeral of a pastor named Clementa Pinckney, who had been one of nine people killed in a racially motivated shooting earlier in the month at an African Methodist Episcopal church known simply as Mother Emanuel. The victims, all African Americans, had welcomed an unemployed twenty-one-year-old white man—a stranger to them all—into their Bible study group. He’d sat with them for a while; then, after the group bowed their heads in prayer, he stood up and began shooting. In the middle of it, he was reported to have said, “I have to do this, because you rape our women and you’re taking over our country.”
After delivering a moving eulogy for Reverend Pinckney and acknowledging the deep tragedy of the moment, Barack surprised everyone by leading the congregation in a slow and soulful rendition of “Amazing Grace.” It was a simple invocation of hope, a call to persist. Everyone in the room, it seemed, joined in. For more than six years now, Barack and I had lived with an awareness that we ourselves were a provocation. As minorities across the country were gradually beginning to take on more significant roles in politics, business, and entertainment, our family had become the most prominent example. Our presence in the White House had been celebrated by millions of Americans, but it also contributed to a reactionary sense of fear and resentment among others. The hatred was old and deep and as dangerous as ever.
We lived with it as a family, and we lived with it as a nation. And we carried on, as gracefully as we could.
* * *
The same day as the funeral service in Charleston—June 26, 2015—the Supreme Court of the United States issued a landmark decision, affirming that same-sex couples had the right to marry in all fifty states. This was the culmination of a legal battle that had been fought methodically over decades, state by state, court by court, and as with any civil rights struggle it had required the persistence and courage of many people. On and off over the course of the day, I’d caught reports of Americans overjoyed by the news. A jubilant crowd chanted, “Love has won!” on the steps of the Supreme Court. Couples were flocking to city halls and county courthouses to exercise what was now a constitutional right. Gay bars were opening early. Rainbow flags waved on street corners around the country.
All this had helped buoy us through a sad day in South Carolina. Returning home to the White House, we’d changed out of our funeral clothes, had a quick dinner with the girls, and then Barack had disappeared into the Treaty Room to flip on ESPN and catch up on work. I was heading to my dressing room when I caught sight of a purplish glow through one of the north-facing windows of the residence, at which point I remembered that our staff had planned to illuminate the White House in the rainbow colors of the pride flag.
Looking out the window, I saw that beyond the gates on Pennsylvania Avenue, a big crowd of people had gathered in the summer dusk to see the lights. The north drive was filled with government staff who’d stayed late to see the White House transformed in celebration of marriage equality. The decision had touched so many people. From where I stood, I could see the exuberance, but I could hear nothing. It was an odd part of our reality. The White House was a silent, sealed fortress, almost all sound blocked by the thickness of its windows and walls. The Marine One helicopter could land on one side of the house, its rotor blades kicking up gale-force winds and slamming tree branches, but inside the residence we’d hear nothing. I usually figured out that Barack had arrived home from a trip not by the sound of his helicopter but rather by the smell of its fuel, which somehow managed to permeate.