My mother hadn’t wanted to come with us to Washington, but I’d forced the issue. The girls needed her. I needed her. I liked to believe that she needed us, too. For the last few years, she’d been a nearly everyday presence in our lives, her practicality a salve to everyone’s worries. At seventy-one, though, she’d never lived anywhere but Chicago. She was reluctant to leave the South Side and her home on Euclid Avenue. （“I love those people, but I love my own house,” she told a reporter after the election, not mincing any words. “The White House reminds me of a museum and it’s like, how do you sleep in a museum?”）
I tried to explain that if she moved to Washington, she’d meet all sorts of interesting people, wouldn’t have to cook or clean for herself anymore, and would have more room on the top floor of the White House than she’d ever had at home. None of this was meaningful to her. My mother was impervious to all manner of glamour and hype.
I’d finally called Craig. “You’ve got to talk to Mom for me,” I said. “Please get her on board with this.”
Somehow that worked. Craig was good at strong-arming when he needed to be.
My mother would end up staying with us in Washington for the next eight years, but at the time she claimed the move was temporary, that she’d stay only until the girls got settled. She also refused to get put into any bubble. She declined Secret Service protection and avoided the media in order to keep her profile low and her footprint light. She’d charm the White House housekeeping staff by insisting on doing her own laundry, and for years to come, she’d slip in and out of the residence as she pleased, walking out the gates and over to the nearest CVS or Filene’s Basement when she needed something, making new friends and meeting them out regularly for lunch. Anytime a stranger commented that she looked exactly like Michelle Obama’s mother, she’d just give a polite shrug and say, “Yeah, I get that a lot,” before carrying on with her business. As she always had, my mother did things her own way.
* * *
My whole family came for the inauguration. My aunts, uncles, and cousins came. Our friends from Hyde Park came, along with my girlfriends and their spouses. Everyone brought their kids. We’d planned twin festivities for the big and small people over inauguration week, including a kids’ concert, a separate lunch for kids to take place during the traditional luncheon at the Capitol right after the swearing in, and a scavenger hunt and children’s party at the White House that would go on while the rest of us went to inaugural balls.
One of the surprise blessings of the final few months of campaigning had been an organic and harmonious merging of our family with Joe Biden’s. Though they’d been political rivals only months earlier, Barack and Joe had a natural rapport, both of them able to slide with ease between the seriousness of their work and the lightness of family.
I liked Jill, Joe’s wife, right away, admiring her gentle fortitude and her work ethic. She’d married Joe and become stepmother to his two sons in 1977, five years after his first wife and baby daughter were tragically killed in a car accident. Later, they’d had a daughter of their own. Jill had recently earned her doctorate in education and had managed to teach English at a community college in Delaware not just through Joe’s years as a senator but also through his two presidential campaigns. Like me, she was interested in finding new ways to support military families. Unlike me, she had a direct emotional connection to the issue: Beau Biden, Joe’s older son, was serving in Iraq with the National Guard. He’d been granted a short leave to travel to Washington and see his dad get sworn in as vice president.
And then there were the Biden grandkids, five altogether, all of them as outgoing and unassuming as Joe and Jill themselves. They’d shown up at the Democratic National Convention in Denver and swept Sasha and Malia right into their boisterous fold, hosting our girls for a sleepover in Joe’s hotel suite, all too happy to ignore the politics happening around them in favor of making new friends. We were grateful, always, to have the Biden kids around.
Inauguration Day was bitingly cold, with temperatures never going above freezing and the wind making it feel more like fifteen degrees. That morning, Barack and I went to church with the girls, my mom, Craig and Kelly, Maya and Konrad, and Mama Kaye. All the while, we were hearing that people had begun forming lines at the National Mall before dawn, bundled up as they waited for the inaugural activities to begin. As cold as I would eventually get that day, I’d forever remember how many people stood outside for many more hours than I did, convinced it was worth it to endure the chill. We’d learn later that nearly two million people had flooded the Mall, arriving from all parts of the country, a sea of diversity, energy, and hope stretching for more than a mile from the U.S. Capitol past the Washington Monument.
After church, Barack and I headed to the White House to join up with Joe and Jill, along with President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, and their wives, all of us gathering for coffee and tea before motorcading together to the Capitol for the swearing in. At some point earlier, Barack had received the authorization codes that would allow him to access the country’s nuclear arsenal and a briefing on the protocols for using them. From now on, wherever he went, he’d be closely trailed by a military aide carrying a forty-five-pound briefcase containing launch authentication codes and sophisticated communications devices, often referred to as the nuclear football. That, too, was heavy.
For me, the ceremony itself would become another one of those strange, slowed-down experiences where the scope was so enormous I couldn’t fully process what was going on. We were ushered to a private room in the Capitol ahead of the ceremony so that the girls could have a snack and Barack could take a few minutes with me to practice putting his hand on the small red Bible that had belonged 150 years earlier to Abraham Lincoln. At that same moment, many of our friends, relatives, and colleagues were finding their seats on the platform outside. It occurred to me later that this was probably the first time in history that so many people of color had sat before the public and a global television audience, acknowledged as VIPs at an American inauguration.
Barack and I both knew what this day represented to many Americans, especially those who’d been a part of the civil rights movement. He’d made a point of including the Tuskegee Airmen, the history-making African American pilots and ground crews who fought in World War II, among his guests. He’d also invited the group known as the Little Rock Nine, the nine black students who in 1957 had been among the first to test the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision by enrolling at an all-white high school in Arkansas, enduring many months of cruelty and abuse in the name of a higher principle. All of them were senior citizens now, their hair graying and shoulders curving, a sign of the decades and maybe also the weight they’d carried for future generations. Barack had often said that he aspired to climb the steps of the White House because the Little Rock Nine had dared to climb the steps of Central High School. Of every continuum we belonged to, this was perhaps the most important.
Almost exactly at noon that day, we stood before the country with our two girls. I remember really only the smallest things—how brightly the sun fell across Barack’s forehead just then, how a respectful hush came over the crowd as the Supreme Court chief justice, John Roberts, began the proceedings. I remember how Sasha, too small for her presence to register amid a sea of adults, stood proudly on a footstool in order to stay visible. I remember the crispness of the air. I lifted Lincoln’s Bible, and Barack placed his left hand on it, vowing to protect the U.S. Constitution—with a couple of short sentences, solemnly agreeing to take on the country’s every concern. It was weighty and at the same time it was joyful, a feeling mirrored in the inaugural speech Barack would then deliver.