An American journey

BECOMING

Michelle Obama

Crown Publishing Group 

426 pages 

$32.50

Back in the ancestral homeland of Michelle Obama, the architects of Jim Crow took great pains to set down the boundaries and define the roles of anyone living in the pre-modern South. Signs directed people to where they could sit, stand, get a sip of water. They reinforced the social order of an American hierarchy — how people were seen, what they were called, what they had been before the Republic was founded and what was presumed they could never be.

It was with the weight of this history in her bones that Michelle Obama walked onto the world stage as the first black woman to become first lady when her husband, Barack Obama, was sworn in as president in January 2009. 

 “Becoming” is refined and forthright, gracefully written and at times laugh-out-loud funny, with a humbler tone and less name-dropping than might be expected of one who is on chatting terms with the queen of England. One of Obama’s strengths is her ability to look back not from the high perch of celebrity or with the inevitability of hindsight but with the anxieties of the uncertain. 

She was born Michelle LaVaughn Robinson, in January 1964, during the term of Lady Bird Johnson. Her family lived on the second floor of a brick bungalow owned by a prim great-aunt and her fastidious husband. Her father, Fraser Robinson III, worked for the city tending boilers for a water filtration plant, and her mother, Marian Shields Robinson, stayed at home looking after Michelle and her older brother, Craig. The Shields and Robinson families had fled the Jim Crow South for Chicago decades before, during the Great Migration of African-Americans out of the South to the North and West. 

Like many Americans, Obama’s parents made do with what they had and poured their energy into their children, who they hoped would fulfil the families’ as yet unrealised aspirations. The parents bought them a set of Encyclopaedia Britannica and insisted on proper diction. 

Upstanding though the Robinsons may have been, they watched as moving vans showed up at the houses of one neighbour after another, and soon the remaining white residents along with the better-off black ones peeled off for the suburbs. Michelle’s family stayed on, Craig attending Catholic school and Michelle qualifying for an elite magnet high school. We follow her as she logs three hours round trip to the school, switching buses at Michigan Avenue in the thick of rush hour, noticing the “men and women in smart outfits — in suits and skirts and clicking heels — carrying their coffee to work with a bustle of self-importance,” and admiring “how determined they looked.” In time, she would see the problem with caring about what other people think. For now, she was following the path she had assigned herself and, by 25, was a lawyer at Sidley & Austin in Chicago, with an office on the 47th floor, an assistant, a wine subscription service, Armani suits. And, “because you can, you buy yourself a Saab.”

One day, a senior partner asked her to mentor an incoming summer associate who, like her, was black and from Harvard but had an unusual name. Their first meeting did not get off to a promising start. He was late, for one thing. “Any sign of this guy?” she asked her assistant. “Girl, no,” the assistant called back, amused. There had been a lot of advance hype at the firm about Barack Obama, which only made her sceptical. She had seen his picture in the summer staff directory. “I checked out his photo,” she writes. “A less-than-flattering, poorly lit head shot of a guy with a big smile and a whiff of geekiness — and remained unmoved.” As was expected of mentors, she took him to lunch, at which he did something that seemed to foreclose any romantic possibilities. “Appallingly, at the end of lunch, Barack lit a cigarette,” she writes, “which would have been enough to snuff any interest, if I’d had any to begin with.”  

How their office relationship turned into a quick-moving romance that summer is a delight to read, even though, or perhaps because, we know the outcome. His cerebral intensity was clear from the start.  After some theoretical disquisitions on the subject of marriage, in which she was the traditionalist and he was, well, not, he surprised her in a sweetly clever scene that could be out of a Hollywood rom-com. Then, in 1996, a seat opened up in the Illinois State Senate, and Barack wanted to run for it. Michelle stood her ground as best she could. 

True to her fears, the bigger the two of them got, the greater the scrutiny and criticism. When he finally won the Democratic nomination, she joined him on stage in Minnesota and greeted him with what she considered “a playful fist bump,” only to see it interpreted on Fox News as “a terrorist fist jab.” 

There can be few African-Americans, or other marginalised people, who would not nod in recognition at some aspect of her story. But just as important, her family’s devotion and work ethic, the steadfastness and sacrifice, are evidence of how much we all have in common if we could but see it.

To this day, when people speak to her mother, Marian Robinson, about the success of her children, coming out of the South Side of Chicago as they did, she is quick to correct them. “They’re not special at all,” Robinson says. “The South Side is filled with kids like that.” And, one might add, so is America.

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