It was a phrase borrowed from a book he’d read when he first started out as an organizer, and it would stay with me for years. It was as close as I’d come to understanding what motivated Barack. The world as it should be.
Next to me, the woman with the toddler on her lap all but exploded. “That’s right!” she bellowed, finally convinced. “Amen!”
Amen, I thought to myself. Because I was convinced, too.
* * *
Before he returned to law school, sometime in the middle of August, Barack told me he loved me. The feeling had flowered between us so quickly and naturally that there was nothing especially memorable about the moment itself. I don’t recall when or how exactly it happened. It was just an articulation, tender and meaningful, of the thing that had caught us both by surprise. Even though we’d known each other only a couple of months, even though it was kind of impractical, we were in love.
But now we had to navigate the more than nine hundred miles that would separate us. Barack had two years of school left and said he hoped to settle in Chicago when he was done. There was no expectation that I would leave my life there in the interim. As a still-newish associate at Sidley, I understood that the next phase of my career was critical—that my accomplishments would determine whether I made partner or not. Having been through law school myself, I also knew how busy Barack would be. He’d been chosen as an editor on the Harvard Law Review, a monthly student-run journal that was considered one of the top legal publications in the country. It was an honor to be picked for the editorial team, but it was also like tacking a full-time job onto the already-heavy load of being a law student.
What did this leave us with? It left us with the phone. Keep in mind that this was 1989, when phones didn’t live in our pockets. Texting wasn’t a thing; no emoji could sub for a kiss. The phone required both time and mutual availability. Personal calls happened usually at home, at night, when you were dog tired and in need of sleep.
Barack told me, ahead of leaving, that he preferred letter writing.
“I’m not much of a phone guy” was how he put it. As if that settled it.
But it settled nothing. We’d just spent the whole summer talking. I wasn’t going to relegate our love to the creeping pace of the postal service. This was another small difference between us: Barack could pour his heart out through a pen. He’d been raised on letters, sustenance arriving in the form of wispy airmail envelopes from his mom in Indonesia. I, meanwhile, was an in-your-face sort of person—brought up on Sunday dinners at Southside’s, where you sometimes had to shout to be heard.
In my family, we gabbed. My dad, who’d recently traded in his car for a specialized van to accommodate his disability, still made a point of showing up in his cousins’ doorways as often as possible for in-person visits. Friends, neighbors, and cousins of cousins also regularly turned up on Euclid Avenue and planted themselves in the living room next to my father in his recliner to tell stories and ask for advice. Even David, my old high school boyfriend, sometimes dropped in to seek his counsel. My dad had no problem with the phone, either. For years, I’d seen him call my grandmother in South Carolina almost daily, asking for her news.
I informed Barack that if our relationship was going to work, he’d better get comfortable with the phone. “If I’m not talking to you,” I announced, “I might have to find another guy who’ll listen.” I was joking, but only a little.
And so it was that Barack became a phone guy. Over the course of that fall, we spoke as often as we could manage, both of us locked into our respective worlds and schedules but still sharing the little details of our days, commiserating over the heap of corporate tax cases he had to read, or laughing about how I’d taken to sweating out my office frustrations at after-work aerobics. As months passed, our feelings stayed steady and reliable. For me, it became one less thing in life to question.
At Sidley & Austin, I was part of the Chicago office’s recruiting team, tasked with interviewing Harvard Law School students for summer-associate jobs. It was essentially a wooing process. As a student, I’d experienced for myself the power and temptation of the corporate-law industrial complex, having been given a binder as thick as a dictionary that listed law firms across the country and told that every one of them was interested in landing Harvard-educated lawyers. It would seem that with the imprimatur of a Harvard JD, you had a shot at working in any city, in any field of law, whether it be at a mammoth litigation firm in Dallas or a boutique real-estate firm in New York. If you were curious about any of them, you requested an on-campus interview. If that went well, you were then treated to a “fly-out,” which amounted to a plane ticket, a five-star hotel room, and another round of interviews at the firm’s office, followed by some extravagant wine-and-dine experience with recruiters like me. While at Harvard, I’d availed myself of fly-outs to San Francisco and Los Angeles, in part to check out entertainment-law practices there but also, if I was honest, because I’d never been to California.
Now that I was at Sidley and on the other side of the recruiting experience, my goal was to bring in law students who were not just smart and hard-driving but also something other than male and white. There was exactly one other African American woman on the recruiting team, a senior associate named Mercedes Laing. Mercedes was about ten years older than I was and became a dear friend and mentor. Like me, she had two Ivy League degrees and routinely sat at tables where nobody looked like her. The struggle, we agreed, was not to get used to it or accept it. In meetings on recruitment, I argued insistently—and I’m sure brazenly, in some people’s opinion—that the firm cast a wider net when it came to finding young talent. The long-held practice was to engage students from a select group of law schools—Harvard, Stanford, Yale, Northwestern, the University of Chicago, and the University of Illinois, primarily—the places where most of the firm’s lawyers had earned their degrees. It was a circular process: one generation of lawyers hiring new lawyers whose life experience mirrored their own, leaving little room for diversity of any sort. In fairness to Sidley, this was a problem （whether recognized or not） at virtually every big firm in the country. A National Law Journal survey from the time found that in large firms African Americans made up not quite 3 percent of all associates and less than 1 percent of all partners.
Trying to help remedy the imbalance, I pushed for us to consider law students coming from other state schools and from historically black colleges like Howard University. When the recruiting team gathered in a conference room in Chicago with a pile of student résumés to review, I objected anytime a student was automatically dismissed for having a B on a transcript or for having gone to a less prestigious undergraduate program. If we were serious about bringing in minority lawyers, I asserted, we’d have to look more holistically at candidates. We’d need to think about how they’d used whatever opportunities life had afforded them rather than measuring them simply by how far they’d made it up an elitist academic ladder. The point wasn’t to lower the firm’s high standards: It was to realize that by sticking with the most rigid and old-school way of evaluating a new lawyer’s potential, we were overlooking all sorts of people who could contribute to the firm’s success. We needed to interview more students, in other words, before writing them off.