Forget that she sometimes wore a diamond crown and that I’d flown to London on the presidential jet; we were just two tired ladies oppressed by our shoes. I then did what’s instinctive to me anytime I feel connected to a new person, which is to express my feelings outwardly. I laid a hand affectionately across her shoulder.
I couldn’t have known it in the moment, but I was committing what would be deemed an epic faux pas. I’d touched the Queen of England, which I’d soon learn was apparently not done. Our interaction at the reception was caught on camera, and in the coming days it would be reproduced in media reports all over the world: “A Breach in Protocol!” “Michelle Obama Dares to Hug the Queen!” It revived some of the campaign-era speculation that I was generally uncouth and lacking the standard elegance of a First Lady, and worried me somewhat, too, thinking I’d possibly distracted from Barack’s efforts abroad. But I tried not to let the criticism rattle me. If I hadn’t done the proper thing at Buckingham Palace, I had at least done the human thing. I daresay that the Queen was okay with it, too, because when I touched her, she only pulled closer, resting a gloved hand lightly on the small of my back.
The following day, while Barack went off for a marathon session of meetings on the economy, I went to visit a school for girls. It was a government-funded, inner-city secondary school in the Islington neighborhood, not far from a set of council estates, which is what public-housing projects are called in England. More than 90 percent of the school’s nine hundred students were black or from an ethnic minority; a fifth of them were the children of immigrants or asylum seekers. I was drawn to it because it was a diverse school with limited financial resources and yet had been deemed academically outstanding. I also wanted to make sure that when I visited a new place as First Lady, I really visited it—meaning that I’d have a chance to meet the people who actually lived there, not just those who governed them. Traveling abroad, I had opportunities that Barack didn’t. I could escape the stage-managed multilateral meetings and sit-downs with leaders and find new ways to bring a little extra warmth to those otherwise staid visits. I aimed to do it with every foreign trip, beginning in England.
I wasn’t fully prepared, though, to feel what I did when I set foot inside the Elizabeth Garrett Anderson School and was ushered to an auditorium where about two hundred students had gathered to watch some of their peers perform and then hear me speak. The school was named after a pioneering doctor who also became the first female mayor elected in England. The building itself was nothing special—a boxy brick building on a nondescript street. But as I settled into a folding chair onstage and started watching the performance—which included a Shakespeare scene, a modern dance, and a chorus singing a beautiful rendition of a Whitney Houston song—something inside me began to quake. I almost felt myself falling backward into my own past.
You had only to look around at the faces in the room to know that despite their strengths these girls would need to work hard to be seen. There were girls in hijab, girls for whom English was a second language, girls whose skin made up every shade of brown. I knew they’d have to push back against the stereotypes that would get put on them, all the ways they’d be defined before they’d had a chance to define themselves. They’d need to fight the invisibility that comes with being poor, female, and of color. They’d have to work to find their voices and not be diminished, to keep themselves from getting beaten down. They would have to work just to learn.
But their faces were hopeful, and now so was I. For me it was a strange, quiet revelation: They were me, as I’d once been. And I was them, as they could be. The energy I felt thrumming in that school had nothing to do with obstacles. It was the power of nine hundred girls striving.
When the performance was done and I went to the lectern to speak, I could barely contain my emotion. I glanced down at my prepared notes but suddenly had little interest in them. Looking up at the girls, I just began to talk, explaining that though I had come from far away, carrying this strange title of First Lady of the United States, I was more like them than they knew. That I, too, was from a working-class neighborhood, raised by a family of modest means and loving spirit, that I’d realized early on that school was where I could start defining myself—that an education was a thing worth working for, that it would help spring them forward in the world.
At this point, I’d been First Lady for just over two months. In different moments, I’d felt overwhelmed by the pace, unworthy of the glamour, anxious about our children, and uncertain of my purpose. There are pieces of public life, of giving up one’s privacy to become a walking, talking symbol of a nation, that can seem specifically designed to strip away part of your identity. But here, finally, speaking to those girls, I felt something completely different and pure—an alignment of my old self with this new role. Are you good enough? Yes, you are, all of you. I told the students of Elizabeth Garrett Anderson that they’d touched my heart. I told them that they were precious, because they truly were. And when my talk was over, I did what was instinctive. I hugged absolutely every single girl I could reach.
* * *
Back home in Washington, spring had arrived. The sun came up earlier and stayed out a little longer each day. I watched as the slope of the South Lawn gradually turned a lush and vibrant green. From the windows of the residence, I could see the red tulips and lavender grape hyacinth that surrounded the fountain at the base of the hill. My staff and I had spent the past two months working to turn my idea for a garden into reality, which hadn’t been easy. For one thing, we’d had to persuade the National Park Service and the White House grounds team to tear up a patch of one of the most iconic lawns in the world. The very suggestion had been met with resistance, initially. It had been decades since a White House Victory Garden had been planted, on Eleanor Roosevelt’s watch, and no one seemed much interested in a reprise. “They think we’re insane,” Sam Kass told me at one point.
Eventually, though, we got our way. We were at first allotted a tiny plot of land tucked away behind the tennis courts, next to a toolshed. To his credit, Sam fought for better real estate, finally securing an L-shaped eleven-hundred-square-foot plot in a sun-splashed part of the South Lawn, not far from the Oval Office and the swing set we’d recently installed for the girls. We coordinated with the Secret Service to make sure our tilling wouldn’t disrupt any of the sensors or sight lines they needed to protect the grounds. We ran tests to determine whether the soil had enough nutrients and didn’t contain any toxic elements like lead or mercury.
And then we were good to go.
Several days after I returned from Europe, I hosted a group of students from Bancroft Elementary School, a bilingual school in the northwestern part of the city. Weeks earlier, we’d used shovels and hoes to prepare the soil. Now the same kids were back to help me do the planting. Our patch of dirt sat not far from the southern fence along E Street, where tourists often congregated to gaze up at the White House. I was glad that this would now be a part of their view.
Or at least I hoped to be glad at some point. Because with a garden you never know for sure what will or won’t happen—whether anything, in fact, will grow. We’d invited the media to cover the planting. We’d invited all the White House chefs to help us, along with Tom Vilsack, Barack’s secretary of agriculture. We’d asked everyone to watch what we were doing. Now we had to wait for the results. “Honestly,” I’d said to Sam before anyone arrived that morning, “this better work.”