Becoming Read online

  One evening I stopped by and found my father alone, my mother having gone home for the night, the nurses clustered outside at their hallway station. The room was quiet. The whole floor of the hospital was quiet. It was the first week of March, the winter snow having just melted, leaving the city in what felt like a perpetual state of dampness. My dad had been in the hospital about ten days then. He was fifty-five years old, but he looked like an old man, with yellowed eyes and arms too heavy to move. He was awake but unable to speak, whether due to the swelling or due to emotion, I’ll never know.

  I sat in a chair next to his bed and watched him laboring to breathe. When I put my hand in his, he gave it a comforting squeeze. We looked at each other silently. There was too much to say, and at the same time it felt as if we’d said everything. What was left was only one truth. We were reaching the end. He would not recover. He was going to miss the whole rest of my life. I was losing his steadiness, his comfort, his everyday joy. I felt tears spilling down my cheeks.

  Keeping his gaze on me, my father lifted the back of my hand to his lips and kissed it again and again and again. It was his way of saying, Hush now, don’t cry. He was expressing sorrow and urgency, but also something calmer and deeper, a message he wanted to make clear. With those kisses, he was saying that he loved me with his whole heart, that he was proud of the woman I’d become. He was saying that he knew he should have gone to the doctor a lot sooner. He was asking for forgiveness. He was saying good-bye.

  I stayed with him until he fell asleep that night, leaving the hospital in icy darkness and driving back home to Euclid Avenue, where my mother had already turned off the lights. We were alone in the house now, just me and my mom and whatever future we were now meant to have. Because by the time the sun came up, he’d be gone. My father—Fraser Robinson III—had a heart attack and passed away that night, having given us absolutely everything.

  11

  It hurts to live after someone has died. It just does. It can hurt to walk down a hallway or open the fridge. It hurts to put on a pair of socks, to brush your teeth. Food tastes like nothing. Colors go flat. Music hurts, and so do memories. You look at something you’d otherwise find beautiful—a purple sky at sunset or a playground full of kids—and it only somehow deepens the loss. Grief is so lonely this way.

  The day after my father died, we drove to a South Side funeral parlor—me, my mother, and Craig—to pick out a casket and plan a service. To make arrangements, as they say in funeral parlors. I don’t remember much about our visit there, except for how stunned we were, each of us bricked inside our private grief. Still, as we went through the obscene ritual of shopping for the right box in which to bury our dad, Craig and I managed to have our first and only fight as adult siblings.

  It boiled down to this: I wanted to buy the fanciest, most expensive casket in the place, complete with every extra handle and cushion a casket could possibly have. I had no particular rationale for wanting this. It was something to do when there was nothing else to do. The practical, pragmatic part of our upbringing wouldn’t allow me to put much stock in the gentle, well-intentioned platitudes people would heap on us a few days later at the funeral. I couldn’t be easily comforted by the suggestion that my dad had gone to a better place or was sitting with angels. As I saw it, he just deserved a nice casket.

  Craig, meanwhile, insisted that Dad would want something basic—modest and practical and nothing more. It suited our father’s personality, he said. Anything else would be too showy.

  We started quiet, but soon exploded, as the kindly funeral director pretended not to listen and our mother just stared at us implacably, through the fog of her own pain.

  We were yelling for reasons that had nothing to do with the actual argument. Neither of us was invested in the outcome. In the end, we’d bury our dad in a compromise casket—nothing too fancy, nothing too plain—and never once discuss it again. We were having an absurd and inappropriate argument because in the wake of death every single thing on earth feels absurd and inappropriate.

  Later, we drove Mom back to Euclid Avenue. The three of us sat downstairs at the kitchen table, spent and sullen now, our misery provoked all over again by the sight of the fourth empty chair. Soon, we were weeping. We sat for what felt like a long time, blubbering until we were exhausted and out of tears. My mother, who hadn’t said much all day, finally offered a comment.

  “Look at us,” she said, a little ruefully.

  And yet there was a touch of lightness in how she said it. She was pointing out that we Robinsons had been reduced to a true and ridiculous mess—unrecognizable with our swollen eyelids and dripping noses, our hurt and strange helplessness here in our own kitchen. Who were we? Didn’t we know? Hadn’t he shown us? She was calling us back from our loneliness with three blunt words, as only our mom could do.

  Mom looked at me and I looked at Craig, and suddenly the moment seemed a little funny. The first chuckle, we knew, would normally have come from that empty chair. Slowly, we started to titter and crack up, collapsing finally into full-blown fits of laughter. I realize that might seem strange, but we were so much better at this than we were at crying. The point was he would have liked it, and so we let ourselves laugh.

  * * *

  Losing my dad exacerbated my sense that there was no time to sit around and ponder how my life should go. My father was just fifty-five when he died. Suzanne had been twenty-six. The lesson there was simple: Life is short and not to be wasted. If I died, I didn’t want people remembering me for the stacks of legal briefs I’d written or the corporate trademarks I’d helped defend. I felt certain that I had something more to offer the world. It was time to make a move.

  Still unsure of where I hoped to land, I typed up letters of introduction and sent them to people all over the city of Chicago. I wrote to the heads of foundations, community-oriented nonprofits, and big universities in town, reaching out specifically to their legal departments—not because I wanted to do legal work, but because I figured they were more likely to respond to my résumé. Thankfully, a number of people did respond, inviting me to have lunch or come in for a meeting, even if they had no job to offer. Over the course of the spring and summer of 1991, I put myself in front of anyone I thought might be able to give me advice. The point was less to find a new job than to widen my understanding of what was possible and how others had gone about it. I was realizing that the next phase of my journey would not simply unfold on its own, that my fancy academic degrees weren’t going to automatically lead me to fulfilling work. Finding a career as opposed to a job wouldn’t just come from perusing the contact pages of an alumni directory; it required deeper thought and effort. I would need to hustle and learn. And so, again and again, I laid out my professional dilemma for the people I met, quizzing them on what they did and whom they knew. I asked earnest questions about what kind of work might be available to a lawyer who didn’t, in fact, want to practice law.

  One afternoon, I visited the office of a friendly, thoughtful man named Art Sussman, who was the in-house legal counsel for the University of Chicago. It turned out that my mother had once spent about a year working for him as a secretary, taking dictation and maintaining the legal department’s files. This was back when I was a sophomore in high school, before she’d taken her job at the bank. Art was surprised to learn that I hadn’t ever visited her at work—that I’d never actually set foot on the university’s pristine Gothic campus before now, despite having grown up just a few miles away.

  If I was honest, there’d been no reason for me to visit the campus. My neighborhood school didn’t run field trips there. If there were cultural events open to the community when I was a kid, my family hadn’t known about them. We had no friends—no acquaintances, even—who were students or alumni. The University of Chicago was an elite school, and to most everyone I knew growing up, elite meant not for us. Its gray stone buildings almost literally had thei
r backs turned to the streets surrounding campus. Driving past, my dad used to roll his eyes at the flocks of students haplessly jaywalking across Ellis Avenue, wondering how it was that such smart people had never learned to properly cross a street.

  Like many South Siders, my family maintained what was an admittedly dim and limited view of the university, even if my mom had passed a year happily working there. When it came time for me and Craig to think about college, we didn’t even consider applying to the University of Chicago. Princeton, for some strange reason, had struck us as more accessible.

  Hearing all this, Art was incredulous. “You’ve really never been here?” he said. “Never?”

  “Nope, not once.”

  There was an odd power in saying it out loud. I hadn’t given the idea much thought before now, but it occurred to me that I’d have made a perfectly fine University of Chicago student, if only the town-gown divide hadn’t been so vast—if I’d known about the school and the school had known about me. Thinking about this, I felt an internal prick, a small subterranean twinge of purpose. The combination of where I came from and what I’d made of myself gave me a certain, possibly meaningful perspective. Being black and from the South Side, I suddenly saw, helped me recognize problems that a man like Art Sussman didn’t even realize existed.

  In several years, I’d get my chance to work for the university and reckon with some of these community-relations problems directly, but right now Art was just kindly offering to pass around my résumé.

  “I think you should talk to Susan Sher,” he told me then, unwittingly setting off what to this day feels like an inspired chain reaction. Susan was about fifteen years older than I was. She’d been a partner at a big law firm but had ultimately bailed out of the corporate world, just as I was hoping to do, though she was still practicing law with the Chicago city government. Susan had slate-gray eyes, the kind of fair skin that belongs on a Victorian queen, and a laugh that often ended with a mischievous snort. She was gently confident and highly accomplished and would become a lifelong friend. “I’d hire you right now,” she told me when we finally met. “But you just finished telling me how you don’t want to be a lawyer.”

  Instead, Susan proposed what now seems like another fated introduction, steering me and my résumé toward a new colleague of hers at city hall—another ship-jumping corporate lawyer with a yen for public service, this one a fellow daughter of the South Side and someone who would end up altering my course in life, not once, but repeatedly. “The person you really need to meet,” Susan said, “is Valerie Jarrett.”

  Valerie Jarrett was the newly appointed deputy chief of staff to the mayor of Chicago and had deep connections across the city’s African American community. Like Susan, she’d been smart enough to land herself a job in a blue-chip firm after law school and had then been self-aware enough to realize that she wanted out. She’d moved to city hall largely because she was inspired by Harold Washington, who’d been elected mayor in 1983 when I was away at college and was the first African American to hold the office. Washington was a voluble politician with an exuberant spirit. My parents loved him for how he could pepper an otherwise folksy speech with Shakespeare quotes and for the famous, mouth-stuffing vigor with which he ate fried chicken at community events on the South Side. Most important, he had a distaste for the entrenched Democratic machinery that had long governed Chicago, awarding lucrative city contracts to political donors and generally keeping blacks in service to the party but rarely allowing them to advance into official elected roles.

  Building his campaign around reforming the city’s political system and better tending to its neglected neighborhoods, Washington won the election by a hair. His style was brassy and his temperament was bold. He was able to eviscerate opponents with his eloquence and intellect. He was a black, brainy superhero. He clashed regularly and fearlessly with the mostly white old-guard members of the city council and was viewed as something of a walking legend, especially among the city’s black citizens, who saw his leadership as kindling a larger spirit of progressivism. His vision had been an early inspiration for Barack, who arrived in Chicago to work as an organizer in 1985.

  Valerie, too, was drawn by Washington. She was thirty years old when she joined Washington’s staff in 1987, at the start of his second term. She was also the mother of a young daughter and soon to be divorced, which made it a deeply inconvenient time to take the sort of pay cut one does when leaving a swishy law firm and landing in city government. And within months of her starting the job, tragedy struck: Harold Washington abruptly had a heart attack and died at his desk, thirty minutes after holding a press conference about low-income housing. In the aftermath, a black alderman was appointed by the city council to take Washington’s place, but his tenure was relatively short. In a move many African Americans saw as a swift and demoralizing return to the old white ways of Chicago politics, voters went on to elect Richard M. Daley, the son of a previous mayor, Richard J. Daley, who was broadly considered the godfather of Chicago’s famous cronyism.

  Though she had reservations about the new administration, Valerie had decided to stay on at city hall, moving out of the legal department and directly into Mayor Daley’s office. She was glad to be there, as much for the contrast as anything. She described to me how her transition from corporate law into government felt like a relief, an energizing leap out of the super-groomed unreality of high-class law being practiced on the top floors of skyscrapers and into the real world—the very real world.

  Chicago’s City Hall and County Building is a flat-roofed, eleven-story, gray-granite monolith that occupies an entire block between Clark and LaSalle north of the Loop. Compared with the soaring office towers surrounding it, it’s squatty but not without grandeur, featuring tall Corinthian columns out front and giant, echoing lobbies made primarily of marble. The county runs its business out of the east-facing half of the building; the city uses the western half, which houses the mayor and city council members as well as the city clerk. City hall, as I learned on the sweltering summer day I showed up to meet Valerie for a job interview, was both alarmingly and upliftingly packed with people.

  There were couples getting married and people registering cars. There were people lodging complaints about potholes, their landlords, their sewer lines, and everything else they felt the city could improve. There were babies in strollers and old ladies in wheelchairs. There were journalists and lobbyists, and also homeless people just looking to get out of the heat. Out on the sidewalk in front of the building, a knot of activists waved signs and shouted chants, though I can’t remember what it was they were angry about. What I do know is that I was simultaneously taken aback and completely enthralled by the clunky, controlled chaos of the place. City hall belonged to the people. It had a noisy, gritty immediacy that I never felt at Sidley.

  Valerie had reserved twenty minutes on her schedule to talk to me that day, but our conversation ended up stretching for an hour and a half. A thin, light-skinned African American woman dressed in a beautifully tailored suit, she was soft-spoken and strikingly serene, with a steady brown-eyed gaze and an impressive grasp of how the city functioned. She enjoyed her job but didn’t try to gloss over the bureaucratic headaches of government work. Something about her caused me instantly to relax. Years later, Valerie would tell me that to her surprise I’d managed to reverse the standard interview process on her that day—that I’d given her some basic, helpful information about myself, but otherwise I’d grilled her, wanting to understand every last feeling she had about the work she did and how responsive the mayor was to his employees. I was testing the suitability of the work for me as much as she was testing the suitability of me for the work.

  Looking back on it, I’m sure I was only capitalizing on what felt like a rare opportunity to speak with a woman whose background mirrored mine but who was a few years ahead of me in her career trajectory. Valerie was calm, bold, and wise in ways t
hat few people I’d met before were. She was someone to learn from, to stick close to. I saw this right away.

  Before I left, she offered me a job, inviting me to join her staff as an assistant to Mayor Daley, beginning as soon as I was ready. I would no longer be practicing law. My salary would be $60,000, about half of what I was currently making at Sidley & Austin. She told me I should take some time and think about whether I was truly prepared to make this sort of change. It was my leap to consider, my leap to make.

  I had never been one to hold city hall in high regard. Having grown up black and on the South Side, I had little faith in politics. Politics had traditionally been used against black folks, as a means to keep us isolated and excluded, leaving us undereducated, unemployed, and underpaid. I had grandparents who’d lived through the horror of Jim Crow laws and the humiliation of housing discrimination and basically mistrusted authority of any sort. (Southside, as you may recall, thought that even the dentist was out to get him.) My father, who was a city employee most of his life, had essentially been conscripted into service as a Democratic precinct captain in order to even be considered for promotions at his job. He relished the social aspect of his precinct duties but had always been put off by city hall cronyism.