Valerie was the right person to address any concerns. She’d rearranged her entire life in order to work for Washington and then lost him almost immediately. The void that followed Washington’s death offered a kind of cautionary tale for the future, one I’d eventually find myself trying to explain to people across America: In Chicago, we’d made the mistake of putting all our hopes for reform on the shoulders of one person without building the political apparatus to support his vision. Voters, especially liberal and black voters, viewed Washington as a kind of golden savior, a symbol, the man who could change everything. He’d carried the load admirably, inspiring people like Barack and Valerie to move out of the private sector and into community work and public service. But when Harold Washington died, most of the energy he’d generated did, too.
Valerie’s decision to stay on with the mayor’s office had required some thought, but she explained to us why she felt it was the right choice. She described feeling supported by Daley and knowing that she was being useful to the city. Her loyalty, she said, had been to Harold Washington’s principles more than to the man himself. Inspiration on its own was shallow; you had to back it up with hard work. This idea resonated with both me and Barack, and inside that one dinner I felt as if something had been cemented: Valerie Jarrett was now a part of our lives. Without our ever discussing it, it seemed almost as if the three of us had somehow agreed to carry one another a good long way.
* * *
There was one last thing to do, now that we were engaged, now that I’d taken a new job and Barack had made a commitment to Davis, Miner, Barnhill & Galland, the public interest law firm that had been courting him: We took a vacation, or maybe more accurately we went on a sort of pilgrimage. We flew out of Chicago on a Wednesday in late August, had a long wait in the airport in Frankfurt, Germany, and then flew another eight hours to arrive in Nairobi just before dawn, stepping outside in the Kenyan moonlight and into what felt like a different world altogether.
I had been to Jamaica and the Bahamas, and to Europe a few times, but this was my first time being this far from home. I felt Nairobi’s foreignness—or really, my own foreignness in relation to it—immediately, even in the first strains of morning. It’s a sensation I’ve come to love as I’ve traveled more, the way a new place signals itself instantly and without pretense. The air has a different weight from what you’re used to; it carries smells you can’t quite identify, a faint whiff of wood smoke or diesel fuel, maybe, or the sweetness of something blooming in the trees. The same sun comes up, but looking slightly different from what you know.
Barack’s half sister Auma met us at the airport, greeting us both warmly. The two of them had met only a handful of times, beginning six years earlier when Auma had visited Chicago, but they had a close bond. Auma is a year older than Barack. Her mother, Grace Kezia, had been pregnant with Auma when Barack Obama Sr. left Nairobi to study in Hawaii in 1959. （They also had a son, Abongo, who was a toddler at the time.） After he returned to Kenya in the mid-1960s, Barack senior and Kezia went on to have two more children together.
Auma had ebony skin and brilliant white teeth and spoke with a strong British accent. Her smile was enormous and comforting. Arriving in Kenya, I was so tired from the travel I could barely make conversation, but riding into the city in the backseat of Auma’s rattletrap Volkswagen Bug, I took note of how the quickness of her smile was just like Barack’s, how the curve of her head also resembled his. Auma also clearly had inherited the family brains: She’d been raised in Kenya and returned there often, but she’d gone to college in Germany and was still living there, studying for a PhD. She was fluent in English, German, Swahili, and her family’s local language, called Luo. Like us, she was just here for a visit.
Auma had arranged for me and Barack to stay in a friend’s empty apartment, a spartan one-bedroom in a nondescript cinder-block building that had been painted bright pink. For the first couple of days, we were so zonked by jet lag it felt as if we were moving at half speed. Or maybe it was just the pace of Nairobi, which ran on an entirely different logic than Chicago did, its roads and British-style roundabouts clogged by a mix of pedestrians, bikers, cars, and matatus—the tottering, informal jitney-like buses that could be seen everywhere, painted brightly with murals and tributes to God, their roofs piled high with strapped-on luggage, so crowded that passengers sometimes just rode along, clinging precariously to the exterior.
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.