while Sasha waited in the car with my mom. She had her round little face pressed up against the window of the SUV and was staring outward, wide-eyed and pensive, taking in the sight of photographers and onlookers, her thoughts unreadable but her expression sober.
We were asking so much of them. I sat with that thought not just for that entire day but for months and years to come.
* * *
The pace of the transition never slowed. I was bombarded with hundreds of decisions, all of them evidently urgent. I was supposed to pick out everything from bath towels and toothpaste to dish soap and beer for the White House residence, choose my outfits for the inauguration ceremony and fancy balls that would follow it, and figure out logistics for the 150 or so of our close friends and relatives who’d be coming from out of town as our guests. I delegated what I could to Melissa and other members of my transition team. We also hired Michael Smith, a talented interior designer we’d found through a Chicago friend, to help us with furnishing and redecorating the residence and the Oval Office.
The president-elect, I learned, is given access to $100,000 in federal funds to help with moving and redecorating, but Barack insisted that we pay for everything ourselves, using what we’d saved from his book royalties. As long as I’ve known him, he’s been this way: extra-vigilant when it comes to matters of money and ethics, holding himself to a higher standard than even what’s dictated by law. There’s an age-old maxim in the black community: You’ve got to be twice as good to get half as far. As the first African American family in the White House, we were being viewed as representatives of our race. Any error or lapse in judgment, we knew, would be magnified, read as something more than what it was.
In general, I was less interested in the redecorating and inauguration planning than I was in figuring out what I could do with my new role. As I saw it, I didn’t actually have to do anything. No job description meant no job requirements, and this gave me the freedom to choose my agenda. I wanted to ensure any effort I made helped advance the new administration’s larger goals.
To my great relief, both our kids came home happy after the first day of school, and the second, and the third. Sasha brought back homework, which she’d never had before. Malia was already signed up to sing in a middle school choral concert. They reported that kids in other grades sometimes did a double take when they saw them, but everyone was nice. Each day afterward, the motorcade ride to Sidwell Friends felt a little more routine. After about a week, the girls felt comfortable enough to start traveling to school without me, swapping my mother in as their regular escort, which automatically made drop-offs and pickups a bit less of a production, involving fewer agents, vehicles, and guns.
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 every-day 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