of putting all our hopes for reform on the shoulders of one person without building the political apparatus to support his vision. Voters, especially liberal and black voters, viewed Washington as a kind of golden savior, a symbol, the man who could change everything. He’d carried the load admirably, inspiring people like Barack and Valerie to move out of the private sector and into community work and public service. But when Harold Washington died, most of the energy he’d generated did, too.
Valerie’s decision to stay on with the mayor’s office had required some thought, but she explained to us why she felt it was the right choice. She described feeling supported by Daley and knowing that she was being useful to the city. Her loyalty, she said, had been to Harold Washington’s principles more than to the man himself. Inspiration on its own was shallow; you had to back it up with hard work. This idea resonated with both me and Barack, and inside that one dinner I felt as if something had been cemented: Valerie Jarrett was now a part of our lives. Without our ever discussing it, it seemed almost as if the three of us had somehow agreed to carry one another a good long way.
* * *
There was one last thing to do, now that we were engaged, now that I’d taken a new job and Barack had made a commitment to Davis, Miner, Barnhill & Galland, the public interest law firm that had been courting him: We took a vacation, or maybe more accurately we went on a sort of pilgrimage. We flew out of Chicago on a Wednesday in late August, had a long wait in the airport in Frankfurt, Germany, and then flew another eight hours to arrive in Nairobi just before dawn, stepping outside in the Kenyan moonlight and into what felt like a different world altogether.
I had been to Jamaica and the Bahamas, and to Europe a few times, but this was my first time being this far from home. I felt Nairobi’s foreignness—or really, my own foreignness in relation to it—immediately, even in the first strains of morning. It’s a sensation I’ve come to love as I’ve traveled more, the way a new place signals itself instantly and without pretense. The air has a different weight from what you’re used to; it carries smells you can’t quite identify, a faint whiff of wood smoke or diesel fuel, maybe, or the sweetness of something blooming in the trees. The same sun comes up, but looking slightly different from what you know.
Barack’s half sister Auma met us at the airport, greeting us both warmly. The two of them had met only a handful of times, beginning six years earlier when Auma had visited Chicago, but they had a close bond. Auma is a year older than Barack. Her mother, Grace Kezia, had been pregnant with Auma when Barack Obama Sr. left Nairobi to study in Hawaii in 1959. (They also had a son, Abongo, who was a toddler at the time.) After he returned to Kenya in the mid-1960s, Barack senior and Kezia went on to have two more children together.
Auma had ebony skin and brilliant white teeth and spoke with a strong British accent. Her smile was enormous and comforting. Arriving in Kenya, I was so tired from the travel I could barely make conversation, but riding into the city in the backseat of Auma’s rattletrap Volkswagen Bug, I took note of how the quickness of her smile was just like Barack’s, how the curve of her head also resembled his. Auma also clearly had inherited the family brains: She’d been raised in Kenya and returned there often, but she’d gone to college in Germany and was still living there, studying for a PhD. She was fluent in English, German, Swahili, and her family’s local language, called Luo. Like us, she was just here for a visit.
Auma had arranged for me and Barack to stay in a friend’s empty apartment, a spartan one-bedroom in a nondescript cinder-block building that had been painted bright pink. For the first couple of days, we were so zonked by jet lag it felt as if we were moving at half speed. Or maybe it was just the pace of Nairobi, which ran on an entirely different logic than Chicago did, its roads and British-style roundabouts clogged by a mix of pedestrians, bikers, cars, and matatus—the tottering, informal