alone. I fortified myself with daily check-ins with my mom and dad. I’d hugged them that very morning, in fact, before dashing out the door and driving through a heavy rainstorm to get to work. To get to work, I might add, on time.
I looked at my watch.
“Any sign of this guy?” I called to Lorraine.
Her sigh was audible. “Girl, no,” she called back. She was amused, I could tell. She knew how tardiness drove me nuts—how I saw it as nothing but hubris.
Barack Obama had already created a stir at the firm. For one thing, he’d just finished his first year of law school, and normally we only hired second-year students for summer positions. But rumor had it he was exceptional. Word had spread that one of his professors at Harvard—the daughter of a managing partner—claimed he was the most gifted law student she’d ever encountered. Some of the secretaries who’d seen the guy come in for his interview were saying that on top of this apparent brilliance he was also cute.
I was skeptical of all of it. In my experience, you put a suit on any half-intelligent black man and white people tended to go bonkers. I was doubtful he’d earned the hype. I’d checked out his photo in the summer edition of our staff directory—a less-than-flattering, poorly lit head shot of a guy with a big smile and a whiff of geekiness—and remained unmoved. His bio said he was originally from Hawaii, which at least made him a comparatively exotic geek. Otherwise, nothing stood out. The only surprise had come weeks earlier when I made a quick obligatory phone call to introduce myself. I’d been pleasantly startled by the voice on the other end of the line—a rich, even sexy, baritone that didn’t seem to match his photo one bit.
It was another ten minutes before he checked in at the reception area on our floor and I walked out to meet him, finding him seated on a couch—one Barack Obama, dressed in a dark suit and still a little damp from the rain. He grinned sheepishly and apologized for his lateness as he shook my hand. He had a wide smile and was taller and thinner than I’d imagined he’d be—a man who was clearly not much of an eater, who also looked fully unaccustomed to wearing business clothes. If he knew he was arriving with a whiz-kid reputation, it didn’t show. As I walked him through the corridors to my office, introducing him to the cushy mundanities of corporate law—showing him the word-processing center and the coffee machine, explaining our system for tracking billable hours—he was quiet and deferential, listening attentively. After about twenty minutes, I delivered him to the senior partner who’d be his actual supervisor for the summer and went back to my desk.
Later that day, I took Barack to lunch at the fancy restaurant on the first floor of our office building, a place packed with well-groomed bankers and lawyers power lunching over meals priced like dinners. This was the boon of having a summer associate to advise: It was an excuse to eat out and eat well, and to do it on the firm’s expense account. As Barack’s adviser, I was meant to act as a social conduit more than anything. My assignment was to make sure he was happy in the job, that he had someone to come to if he needed advice, and that he felt connected to the larger team. It was the start of a larger wooing process—the idea being, as it was with all summer associates, that the firm might want to recruit him for a full-time job once he had his law degree.
Very quickly, I realized that Barack would need little in the way of advice. He was three years older than I was—about to turn twenty-eight. Unlike me, he’d worked for several years after finishing his undergrad degree at Columbia before moving on to law school. What struck me was how assured he seemed of his own direction in life. He was oddly free from doubt, though at first glance it was hard to understand why. Compared with my own lockstep march toward success, the direct arrow shot of my trajectory from Princeton to Harvard to my desk on the forty-seventh floor, Barack’s path was an improvisational zigzag through disparate worlds. I learned over lunch that he was in every sense a hybrid—the son of