South Africa and ultimately becoming its first president.
Mandela lived on a leafy suburban street in a Mediterranean-style home set behind butter-colored concrete walls. Graça Machel ushered us through a courtyard shaded by trees and into the house, where in a wide, sunlit room her husband sat in an armchair. He had sparse, snowy hair and wore a brown batik shirt. Someone had laid a white blanket across his lap. He was surrounded by several generations of relatives, all of whom welcomed us enthusiastically. Something in the brightness of the room, the volubility of the family, and the squinty smile of the patriarch reminded me of going to my grandfather Southside’s house when I was a kid. I’d been nervous to come, but now I relaxed.
The truth is I’m not sure that the patriarch himself completely grasped who we were or why we’d stopped in. He was an old man at this point, his attention seeming to drift, his hearing a little weak. “This is Michelle Obama!” Graça Machel said, leaning close to his ear. “The wife of the U.S. president!”
“Oh, lovely,” murmured Nelson Mandela. “Lovely.”
He looked at me with genuine interest, though in truth I could have been anyone. It seemed clear that he bestowed this same degree of warmth upon every person who crossed his path. My interaction with Mandela was both quiet and profound—maybe more profound, even, for its quietness. His life’s words had mostly been spoken now, his speeches and letters, his books and protest chants, already etched not just into his story but into humanity’s as a whole. I could feel all of it in the brief moment I had with him—the dignity and spirit that had coaxed equality from a place where none had existed.
I was still thinking about Mandela five days later as we flew back to the United States, traveling north and west over Africa and then across the Atlantic over the course of a long dark night. Sasha and Malia lay sprawled beneath blankets next to their cousins; my mother dozed in a seat nearby. Farther back in the plane, staff and Secret Service members were watching movies and catching up on sleep. The engines hummed. I felt alone and not alone. We were headed home—home being the strange-familiar city of Washington, D.C., with its white marble and clashing ideologies, with everything that still needed to be fought and won. I thought about the young African women I’d met at the leadership forum, all of them now headed back to their own communities to pick up their work again, persevering through whatever tumult they faced.
Mandela had gone to jail for his principles. He’d missed seeing his kids grow up, and then he’d missed seeing many of his grandkids grow up, too. All this without bitterness. All this still believing that the better nature of his country would at some point prevail. He’d worked and waited, tolerant and undiscouraged, to see it happen.
I flew home propelled by that spirit. Life was teaching me that progress and change happen slowly. Not in two years, four years, or even a lifetime. We were planting seeds of change, the fruit of which we might never see. We had to be patient.
* * *
Three times over the course of the fall of 2011, Barack proposed bills that would create thousands of jobs for Americans, in part by giving states money to hire more teachers and first responders. Three times the Republicans blocked them, never even allowing a vote.
“The single most important thing we want to achieve,” the Senate minority leader, Mitch McConnell, had declared to a reporter a year earlier, laying out his party’s goals, “is for President Obama to be a one-term president.” It was that simple. The Republican Congress was devoted to Barack’s failure above all else. It seemed they weren’t prioritizing the governance of the country or the fact that people needed jobs. Their own power came first.
I found it demoralizing, infuriating, sometimes crushing. This was politics, yes, but in its most fractious and cynical form, seemingly disconnected from any larger sense of purpose. I felt emotions that perhaps Barack couldn’t afford to feel. He stayed locked in his work, for the most part undaunted, riding out the bumps and compromising where he could, clinging to the sober-minded, someone’s-gotta-take-this-on brand of optimism that had always guided him. He’d been in politics for fifteen years now. I continued to think of him as