We were on the train for several hours. Barack finally opened a book, but I continued to stare transfixed out the window as the Nairobi slums gave way to jewel-green countryside and the train rattled north to the town of Kisumu, where Auma, Barack, and I disembarked into the broiling equatorial heat and took a last, jackhammering ride on a matatu through the maize fields to their grandmother’s village of Kogelo.
I will always remember the deep red clay of the earth in that part of Kenya, so rich it looked almost primordial, how its dust caked the dark skin and hair of the children who shouted greetings to us from the side of the road. I remember being sweaty and thirsty as we walked the last bit of the way to Barack’s grandmother’s compound, to the well-kept concrete home where she’d lived for years, farming an adjacent vegetable patch and tending several cows. Granny Sarah, they called her. She was a short, wide-built lady with wise eyes and a crinkling smile. She spoke no English, only Luo, and expressed delight that we’d come all this way to see her. Next to her, I felt very tall. She studied me with an extra, bemused curiosity, as if trying to place where I came from and how precisely I’d landed on her doorstep. One of her first questions for me was, “Which one of your parents is white?”
I laughed and explained, with Auma’s help, that I was black through and through, basically as black as we come in America.
Granny Sarah found this funny. She seemed to find everything funny, teasing Barack for not being able to speak her language. I was bowled over by her easy joy. As evening fell, she butchered us a chicken and made us a stew, which she served with a cornmeal mush called ugali. All the while, neighbors and relatives popped in to say hello to the younger Obamas and to congratulate us on our engagement. I gobbled the food gratefully as the sun dropped and night settled over the village, which had no electricity, leaving a bright spray of stars overhead. That I was in this place seemed like a little miracle. I was sharing a rudimentary bedroom with Barack, listening to the stereo sound of crickets in the cornfields all around us, the rustle of animals we couldn’t see. I remember feeling awed by the scope of land and sky around me and at the same time snug and protected inside that tiny home. I had a new job, a fiancé, and an expanded family—an approving Kenyan granny, even. It was true: I’d been flung out of my world, and for the moment it was all good.
12
Barack and I got married on a sunny October Saturday in 1992, the two of us standing before more than three hundred of our friends and family at Trinity United Church of Christ on the South Side. It was a big wedding, and big was how it needed to be. If we were having the wedding in Chicago, there was no trimming the guest list. My roots went too deep. I had not just cousins but also cousins of cousins, and those cousins of cousins had kids, none of whom I’d ever leave out and all of whom made the day more meaningful and merry.
My father’s younger siblings were there. My mother’s family turned out in its entirety. I had old school friends and neighbors who came, people from Princeton, people from Whitney Young. Mrs. Smith, the wife of my high school assistant principal who still lived down the street from us on Euclid Avenue, helped organize the wedding, while our across-the-street neighbors Mr. and Mrs. Thompson and their jazz band played later that day at our reception. Santita Jackson, ebullient in a black dress with a plunging neckline, was my maid of honor. I’d invited old colleagues from Sidley and new colleagues from city hall. The law partners from Barack’s firm were there, as were his old organizer friends. Barack’s rowdy Hawaiian high school guy posse mingled happily with a handful of his Kenyan relatives, who wore brightly colored East African hats. Sadly, we’d lost Gramps—Barack’s grandfather—the previous winter to cancer, but his mother and grandmother had made the trip to Chicago, as had Auma and Maya, half sisters from different continents, united in their affection for Barack. It was the first time our two families had met, and the feeling was joyful.
We were surrounded by love—the eclectic, multicultural Obama kind and the anchoring Robinsons-from-the-South-Side kind, all of it now interwoven visibly, pew to pew, inside the church. I held tightly to Craig’s elbow as he walked me down the aisle. As we reached the front, I caught my mother’s gaze. She was sitting in the first row, looking regal in a floor-length black-and-white sequined dress we’d picked out together, her chin lifted and her eyes proud. We still ached for my father every day, though as he would’ve wanted, we were also continuing on.
Barack had woken up that morning with a nasty head cold, but it had miraculously cleared as soon as he arrived at the church. He was now smiling at me, bright-eyed, from his place at the altar, dressed in a rented tux and a buffed pair of new shoes. Marriage was still more mysterious to him than it was to me, but in the fourteen months we’d been engaged, he’d been nothing but all in. We’d chosen everything about this day carefully. Barack, having initially declared he was not interested in wedding minutiae, had ended up lovingly, assertively—and predictably—inserting his opinion into everything from the flower arrangements to the canapés that would get served at the South Shore Cultural Center in another hour or so. We’d picked our wedding song, which Santita would sing with her stunning voice, accompanied by a pianist.
It was a Stevie Wonder tune called “You and I （We Can Conquer the World）。” I’d first heard it as a kid, in third or fourth grade, when Southside gave me the Talking Book album as a gift—my first record album, utterly precious to me. I kept it at his house and was allowed to play it anytime I came to visit. He’d taught me how to care for the vinyl, how to wipe the record’s grooves clean of dust, how to lift the needle from the turntable and set it down delicately in the right spot. Usually he’d left me alone with the music, making himself scarce so that I could learn, in privacy, everything that album had to teach, mostly by belting out the lyrics again and again with my little-girl lungs. Well, in my mind, we can conquer the world / In love you and I, you and I, you and I…
I was nine years old at the time. I knew nothing about love and commitment or conquering the world. All I could do was conjure for myself shimmery ideas about what love might be like and who might come along someday to make me feel that strong. Would it be Michael Jackson? José Cardenal from the Cubs? Someone like my dad? I couldn’t even begin to imagine him, really, the person who would become the “you” to my “I.”
But now here we were.
Trinity Church had a dynamic and soulful reputation. Barack had first started going there during his days as an organizer, and more recently the two of us had formally become members, following the lead of many of our young, professional African American friends in town. The church’s pastor, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, was known as a sensational preacher with a passion for social justice and was now officiating at our wedding. He welcomed our friends and family and then held up our wedding bands for all to see. He spoke eloquently of what it meant to form a union and have it witnessed by a caring community, these people who collectively knew every dimension of Barack and every dimension of me.
I felt it then—the power of what we were doing, the significance of the ritual—as we stood there with our future still unwritten, with every unknown still utterly unknown, just gripping each other’s hands as we said our vows.