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 kid, 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.
I was skeptical of all of it. In my experience, you put a suit on any half-intelligent black man and white people tended to go bonkers. I was doubtful he’d earned the hype. I’d checked out his photo in the summer edition of our staff directory—a less-than-flattering, poorly lit head shot of a guy with a big smile and a whiff of geekiness—and remained unmoved. His bio said he was originally from Hawaii, which at least made him a comparatively exotic geek. Otherwise, nothing stood out. The only surprise had come weeks earlier when I made a quick obligatory phone call to introduce myself. I’d been pleasantly startled by the voice on the other end of the line—a rich, even sexy, baritone that didn’t seem to match his photo one bit.
It was another ten minutes before he checked in at the reception area on our floor and I walked out to meet him, finding him seated on a couch—one Barack Obama, dressed in a dark suit and still a little damp from the rain. He grinned sheepishly and apologized for his lateness as he shook my hand. He had a wide smile and was taller and thinner than I’d imagined he’d be—a man who was clearly not much of an eater, who also looked fully unaccustomed to wearing business clothes. If he knew he was arriving with a whiz-kid reputation, it didn’t show. As I walked him through the corridors to my office, introducing him to the cushy mundanities of corporate law—showing him the word-processing center and the coffee machine, explaining our system for tracking billable hours—he was quiet and deferential, listening attentively. After about twenty minutes, I delivered him to the senior partner who’d be his actual supervisor for the summer and went back to my desk.
Later that day, I took Barack to lunch at the fancy restaurant on the first floor of our office building, a place packed with well-groomed bankers and lawyers power lunching over meals priced like dinners. This was the boon of having a summer associate to advise: It was an excuse to eat out and eat well, and to do it on the firm’s expense account. As Barack’s adviser, I was meant to act as a social conduit more than anything. My assignment was to make sure he was happy in the job, that he had someone to come to if he needed advice, and that he felt connected to the larger team. It was the start of a larger wooing process—the idea being, as it was with all summer associates, that the firm might want to recruit him for a full-time job once he had his law degree.