you, he’s black and from Harvard. Other than that, you know nothing—just the name, and it’s an odd one.
8
Barack Obama was late on day one. I sat in my office on the forty-seventh floor, waiting and not waiting for him to arrive. Like most first-year lawyers, I was busy. I put in long hours at Sidley & Austin, often eating both lunch and dinner at my desk while combating a continuous flow of documents, all of them written in precise and decorous lawyer-language. I read memos, I wrote memos, I edited other people’s memos. At this point, I thought of myself basically as trilingual. I knew the relaxed patois of the South Side and the high-minded diction of the Ivy League, and now on top of that I spoke Lawyer, too. I’d been hired into the firm’s marketing and intellectual property practice group, which was considered internally more freewheeling and creative than other groups, I suppose because we dealt at least some of the time with advertising. Part of my job involved poring over scripts for our clients’ TV and radio ads, making sure they didn’t violate Federal Communications Commission standards. I would later be awarded the honor of looking after the legal concerns of Barney the Dinosaur. (Yes, this is what passes for freewheeling in a law firm.)
The problem for me was that as a junior associate my work didn’t involve much actual interaction with clients and I was a Robinson, raised in the boisterous scrum of my extended family, molded by my father’s instinctive love of a crowd. I craved interaction of any sort. To offset the solitude, I joked around with Lorraine, my assistant, a hyperorganized, good-humored African American woman several years my senior who sat just outside my office and answered my phone. I had friendly professional relationships with some of the senior partners and perked up at any chance I had to chitchat with my fellow associates, but in general everyone was overloaded with work and careful not to waste one billable minute of the day. Which put me back at my desk, alone with my documents.
If I had to spend seventy hours a week somewhere, my office was a pleasant enough place. I had a leather chair, a buffed walnut desk, and wide windows with a southeastern view. I could look out over the hodgepodge of the business district and see the white-capped waves of Lake Michigan, which in summertime were dotted with bright sailboats. If I angled myself a certain way, I could trace the coastline and glimpse a narrow seam of the South Side with its low-rise rooftops and intermittent stands of trees. From where I sat, the neighborhoods appeared placid and almost toylike, but the reality was in many cases far different. Parts of the South Side had become desolate as businesses shut down and families continued to move out. The steel mills that had once provided stability were cutting thousands of jobs. The crack epidemic, which had ravaged African American communities in places like Detroit and New York, was only just reaching Chicago, but its course was no less destructive. Gangs battled for market share, recruiting young boys to run their street-corner operations, which, while dangerous, was far more lucrative than going to school. The city’s murder rate was starting to tick upward—a sign of even more trouble to come.
I made good money at Sidley but was pragmatic enough to take a bird in the hand when it came to housing. Since finishing law school, I’d been living back in my old South Shore neighborhood, which was still relatively untouched by gangs and drugs. My parents had moved downstairs into Robbie and Terry’s old space, and at their invitation I’d taken over the upstairs apartment, where we’d lived when I was a kid, sprucing it up with a crisp white couch and framed batik prints on the walls. I wrote my parents an occasional check that loosely covered my share of the utilities. It hardly counted as paying rent, but they insisted it was plenty. Though my apartment had a private entrance, I most often tromped through the downstairs kitchen as I came and went from work—in part because my parents’ back door opened directly to the garage and in part because I was still and always would be a Robinson. Even if I now fancied myself the sort of suit-wearing, Saab-driving independent young professional I’d always dreamed of being, I didn’t much like being