Michelle Obama (2 page)

Michelle remembers watching her teenage brother practicing how he would rescue their father from their upstairs apartment in case of a fire. Craig's worries didn't end there. In case something happened to his right hand, he practiced writing with his left. He practiced walking around the house blindfolded, in case he lost his eyesight. He was "one of those people," Michelle remembered, "who are always preparing for an impending disaster."

Behind all these worries was Fraser's illness. Multiple sclerosis is a mysterious disease: It can lead to a variety of symptoms. They may appear at any time.

The last thing their father wanted was for his children to feel responsible for him, but he didn't have a choice. He and Marian taught Michelle and Craig about responsibility. He had to live with the consequences.

Michelle also learned from the uncertainty of her father's illness. "When you have a parent with a disability," Michelle explained to reporter Holly Yeager, "control and structure become critical habits, just to get through the day." Even now, Michelle stays extraordinarily well organized. It has become second nature. It's how she puts off worry, just like when the worry was her father. "She never takes a pass," says her close friend and former boss Valerie Jarrett, who has become an adviser to Barack. "Even after Barack announced [his candidacy for the U.S. Senate], she'd come to every meeting overprepared. You never would have known what was going on in her life."

Fraser's illness led both Michelle and Craig to put a lot of pressure on themselves from an early age. Because of their father's courage, Michelle said, "You never wanted to disappoint him." It didn't matter that Fraser wielded his moral authority with a light touch, mostly just giving his children a look that said what he was thinking. They knew. "If he was disappointed in you, it was the worst thing that could happen in your life," Craig remembered.

That's a lot for a kid to handle. It's natural for kids to disappoint their parents sometimes. It's part of learning and growing up. Michelle and her brother, however, didn't grow up feeling they could make the same mistakes most other kids make. "We always felt we couldn't let Dad down because he worked so hard for us," Craig says. "My sister and I, if one of us ever got in trouble with my father, we'd both be crying. We'd both be like, 'Oh, my god, Dad's upset. How could we do this to him?'"

It wasn't a question they had to ask themselves often. "I always say Michelle raised herself from about nine years old," Marian Robinson says. "She had her head on straight very early." In her own way, Michelle was doing what she saw as her part. Her father and mother had enough to worry about without worrying about her too.

Despite Fraser's illness, the mood at the Robinson home was light. Barack would later say the Robinsons were like the family on the
Leave It to Beaver
television show: a cheerful dad, a mom who made lunches and listened to the kids talk about school, and kids who never got into serious trouble.

As an adult, Michelle remembered her childhood just as her parents hoped. "It was the greatest gift a child could receive," she said about the way Marian and Fraser raised her, "never doubting for a single minute that you're loved and cherished and have a place in this world."

Fraser and Marian put up a partition to turn their living room into two bedrooms, one each for Michelle and Craig. According to one of Michelle's friends, the result was "the smallest room I had ever seen. It was like a closet." But in true 1960s style, Michelle equipped it with a doll house and an Easy-Bake oven, and there was room to play with her African American Barbie, Christie, and Ken.

As for actual television, only one hour a night was allowed. But "somehow," her brother said, "she has managed to commit to memory every single episode of
The Brady Bunch
" Michelle and Craig both liked reading, and their mother kept them challenged with books that were ahead of what teachers expected them to read.

Downstairs in the two-story building was a separate apartment where one of Michelle's great-aunts lived. She was a piano teacher. Michelle took lessons from her. If ever there was a clue that Fraser and Marian had drawn lucky cards with their children, it was this: Michelle practiced without being pushed.

The house was on a street that ran just one block, so it had very little traffic. There was a park at one end. That meant plenty of room to play outside. When they were young, both Michelle and Craig were athletic. But as her brother began to excel in organized sports, Michelle turned her focus elsewhere. There was only so much following she would do, especially given the difficulty of matching Craig. From an early age, he showed the promise that led him to play professional basketball.

Fraser and Marian made it a point to let Michelle and Craig speak their minds, and to question authority. Marian remembered, "We told them, 'Make sure you respect your teachers, but don't hesitate to question them. Don't even allow us to just say anything to you. Ask us why.'" They did. A lot.

In Michelle's case, it's just as well that they didn't try to stop her. That probably would have been impossible. As soon as she could speak, she said what was on her mind, especially if she thought something was wrong. Her mother liked that. Marian didn't have that freedom when she was growing up. "I always resented it when I couldn't say what I felt," she remembered about her childhood. "I always felt like, 'What was wrong with me saying what I feel?'"

Michelle's elementary school, Bryn Mawr (now known as Bouchet Math and Science Academy), was around the corner from her house. By the time she enrolled in first grade, some of the teachers knew from Craig's example what they'd get from Michelle:
a curious and demanding mind. However, it took Michelle a while to understand that Marian's relaxed attitude about kids speaking their minds wasn't shared by every teacher. If Michelle saw something she didn't think was right, she said so. If the teacher didn't respond as thoughtfully as Michelle expected—thanks to her parents' example—Michelle could lose her temper. One time a teacher complained to Marian, who just laughed. "Yeah, she's got a temper," Marian said. "But we decided to keep her anyway!"

What made Michelle angry, even then, was the difference between what she knew from home and what she saw in school. Craig remembered one of the lessons their father tried to pass on: "Life's not fair. It's not. And you don't always get what you deserve, but you have to work hard to get what you want. And then sometimes you don't get it; even if you work hard and do all the right things, you don't get it." All of that is true, and it's worth saying. But life was fair for Michelle at home, thanks to Fraser and Marian and Craig. So it wasn't easy for Michelle to understand why life shouldn't be fair everywhere.

Craig remembers how young Michelle saw the world: "When we were young kids, our parents divided the bedroom we shared so we could each have our own room. Many nights we would talk when we were supposed to be sleeping. My sister always talked about who was getting picked on at school or who was having a tough time at home. I didn't realize it then, but I realize it now: Those were the people she was going to dedicate her life to, the people who were struggling with life's challenges."

Even in elementary school, Fraser and Marian challenged Michelle. Marian was determined to keep Michelle ahead of teachers' expectations. Teaching Michelle to read at an early age was just the start. Fraser and Marian, who had both skipped second grade, made sure Craig and Michelle did the same. "If you aren't challenged, you don't make any progress," Marian later explained. Marian also brought home workbooks for Michelle and Craig, who learned early that good enough wasn't good enough.

Marian, like her husband and children, has a strong competitive streak. (After winning gold medals in sprinting in the Illinois Senior Olympics a few years after Michelle and Craig left for college, an injury slowed her down and she dropped out of racing. "If I can't do it fast, I'm not doing it," she said. "You don't run just to be running—you run to win.") She pushed Michelle and Craig academically as if she were coaching a sport.

"The academic part came first and early in our house," said Craig. "Our parents emphasized hard work and doing your best. Once you get trained like that, then you get used to it and you don't want to get anything but As and Bs."

Like a good coach, Marian pushed Michelle into new and challenging experiences. The school's program for advanced students began in the sixth grade, and Michelle was in it for the next three years, until graduation. She began studying French three years before most students were offered it in ninth grade. She took biology classes at Kennedy-King College.

Kennedy-King exposed her to more than just the inside of frogs. The college was almost four miles away from Bryn Mawr. Earlier than most of her classmates, Michelle was taking independent steps toward her education, searching it out rather than expecting it to come to her. The confidence she gained would soon lead her in unexpected directions.

But first, graduation: Michelle finished Bryn Mawr second in her class of more than one hundred students.

From when she was about ten years old, Michelle and her family made summertime visits to her grandparents in South Carolina. Fraser's father had been born there, and after retiring from work he and Fraser's mother moved back to his old hometown, a city on the coast, Georgetown. As Michelle and her family came to the end of their long drives from Chicago, the road would become flat and the fields alongside it would start to give off a marshy smell. This part of the South Carolina is known as "lowcountry," because a lot of the land is below sea level, leaving it soggy or flooded for most of the year.

When Michelle started to visit, she discovered she had many relatives in the area. Aunts, uncles, and cousins seemed to be all over Georgetown. But it wasn't until many years later, when Barack's campaign attracted the attention of reporters, that some of the most interesting details of the Robinson family's history began to emerge. The lowcountry marshes of South Carolina were once a center of America's economy and culture. The deep roots of Michelle's achievements are here.

In the story of American slavery, Georgetown stands out. The fields in this area were home to several of the country's largest slave plantations.

The largest slave owner in the United States was Joshua J. Ward of Georgetown. By the start of the Civil War in 1861, he owned 1,130 slaves. At the time, an average slave owner in South Carolina owned fifteen slaves. The average in other states was lower. Across the country, only one owner in a hundred owned more than two hundred slaves.

Ward's neighbors included Robert Allston, who owned 631 slaves and was part of an extended family that owned several thousand, and J. Harleston Read, who owned 511 slaves.

The smallest plantation in the area around Georgetown (then known as All Saints Parish and now Georgetown County) had ninety slaves. The average had almost three hundred. These figures are several times more than the average found on farms and plantations in the rest of the country.

Why were there so many more slaves on the local plantations? Because of the crop that was grown there, rice. It requires many more workers than tobacco or cotton does. One hundred slaves might need as long as fifteen years to make an entire plantation ready. Rice grows best in flooded fields, so the slaves had to build a complex network of ditches and canals that could trap and release water according to the growing schedule. "It was back-breaking work," according to Pat Doyle, president of the Georgetown County Historical Society. "You had to clear the marsh, get the stumps up and put in dikes before you ever planted the first grain of rice."

It was also deadly. The swampy fields were home to alligators and poisonous snakes. The standing water bred mosquitoes that spread malaria and yellow fever. Those diseases claimed many lives. "In the summers," writes historian William Dusinberre, "well-to-do people deserted Georgetown like the plague." The plantation owners "would no more have thought of passing a summer in Georgetown than of making a voluntary sojourn in Hades."

The intricate rice fields had to be tended constantly. The soil became muck and had to be cleared out of the ditches. Then the rice had to be harvested, which was a chore in itself. Rice is a heavy crop.

However, at the time, rice was a cash bonanza. The British government's rules about importing goods worked to the benefit of the Georgetown planters, who produced almost half of the rice grown in the United States. "No region offered such fabulous fortunes," writes historian William Freehling. Before the Revolutionary War, the owners of Georgetown's plantations were "perhaps America's richest entrepreneurs."

The slave community that created this wealth was also special. It was better able to preserve African traditions because it was more isolated from whites than most slave communities were. In all, more than eighty-five percent of the people living in All Saints Parish were African American—the highest percentage in the country. During the malaria season, when whites left the area, that number rose to ninety-eight percent. One local planter wrote, "I am actually so startled at the sight of a white face that I avoid my own ... in the [mirror] in the morning."

The result of this separation was a special culture that came to be called Gullah. Its sources were the rice-producing regions of Africa, such as Senegal, Gambia, and Sierra Leone. Slave traders called this the "rice coast." The Georgetown plantation owners strongly preferred slaves from this region. Many of these Africans were already resistant to malaria. They arrived in South Carolina with a knowledge of rice farming. Gullah is a mix of the cultures brought to America. For example, although the Gullah language is based on English, it borrows many of its words and much of its grammar from African languages.

At one time, Gullah culture could be found from North Carolina to Florida. Its heart, however, was in All Saints Parish. (It's still a strong presence in South Carolina and Georgia.) Historian Charles Joyner has called All Saints Parish "a seedbed of black culture in the United States." That also makes it a seedbed of American culture in general. Just one example: When kindergarten students learn the song "Michael, Row the Boat Ashore," they're singing a Gullah hymn. This self-reliant community is where the American era of Michelle's family story begins.