Michelle Obama (3 page)

On summer vacations, young Michelle and her family drove into Georgetown on a highway that became the city's Highmarket Street. This road once connected some of the rice plantations to the downtown port section of Georgetown. Cruising along, none of the Robinsons ever noticed an unmarked dirt side road, about five miles from downtown, that disappeared into a forest of large oak trees. This road led to Friendfield, the old rice plantation where Michelle's great-great-grandfather, Jim Robinson, was a slave.

Friendfield still exists, though it's no longer a working rice farm. Now the overgrown paddies give it the look of a nature preserve. But many of the old canals dug by slaves remain. More astonishing, some of the old slave cabins are still there too. Small, simple buildings of plain boards, they now seem to be far removed from the owner's house. Once, however, these cabins were the most important buildings on the property, and the people who lived here knew that nothing got done at Friendfield unless they did it.

When Jim Robinson was born, around 1850, Friendfield was already a century old. James Withers, the son of the original owner, had just died a few years before. Born before the Revolutionary War, Withers had collected a huge fortune from the plantation. The rice harvested by the Friendfield slaves allowed him to buy land throughout the area and to make generous cash gifts to his family.

Withers built Friendfield's "big house," as the owners' mansions were called. It immediately became one of most admired homes in the state when it was built in 1818. The governor of South Carolina came to the celebration to mark its completion. Although it burned down to its foundations in 1926, it is still considered historically important. Photographs taken of the interiors before the fire appear in art books. (The house was later rebuilt using the original floor plan, then finished with decorations taken from a nearby house of the same era.)

There was nothing modest about the house, which was meant to display Withers's wealth. It could have stood as the model for Scarlett O'Hara's home in
Gone With the Wind.
The wrought-iron porch railings were intricate. A wide circular staircase ran from the entry room to the second and third floors. The ceilings in its large rooms were thirteen feet tall. The windows, also oversized, were covered by curtains of red velvet. The house had a large library, of course. Many if not most of the books would have been imported from Great Britain. The doorknobs were imported ceramic and sterling silver rather than local iron. The living room had a large marble fireplace and careful paneling.

From the time the house was first built, through Michelle's great-great-grandfather's life, and into the twentieth century, the house had another distinctive decoration for which it's still known today: hand-painted scenic wallpaper from France. All the house's owners were proud of it. Created by a prestigious firm, the wallpaper showed the important monuments of Paris, such as Notre Dame Cathedral and the Luxembourg Palace. (The Eiffel Tower was a few decades in the future.) The paper was eight-and-a-half feet tall and forty-eight feet from end to end. Two hundred and fifty artists worked on it. From a modern perspective, it may seem like an unusual way to display wealth and good taste, but it was the height of style when Friendfield was built. Some of the most notable houses of that period were decorated with similar designs. A set of the same scene from another home of Friendfield's era is on permanent display at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. The best examples are found in another famous home from that period, also built by slaves: the White House.

One more detail about Friendfield is worth mentioning. The slaves who dug canals in the rice fields then did the same near the big house. In the late 1700s or early 1800s the plantation owners decided they wanted a large water garden, with canals that snaked around small islands planted with flowers and exotic trees. The slaves made it large enough, and dug the canals deep enough, so that a flat-bottomed boat could be paddled around the islands.

It's not known how Michelle's great-great-grandfather Jim Robinson came to Friendfield. He might have been born there, or he might have come as a child. But he did live at Friendfield as a slave, and, after the Civil War, as a free man.

His last name, which he eventually passed on to Michelle, isn't much help. It's difficult to trace because "Robinson" was the name of several slave owners. There's a slave cemetery at Friendfield, but the few markers show only the slaves' first names. (Two more unmarked slave cemeteries are up the coast in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, where the family cemetery of Fairfield's original owners is located.) Also, some government records spell his name differently.

In 1860, just before the Civil War began, there were 273 slaves at Friendfield. Many stayed in the area after the Union's victory freed them. Some continued to work on the plantation. The family history passed down through the years isn't certain, but it seems that Jim Robinson was one of those workers. In government records from 1880, he's listed as a farmer. He might have been hired help, or he might have farmed a section of the plantation and paid for the land by giving the owner a share of the crop.

Michelle is descended from Jim Robinson's third son. Like her own father, he was named Fraser. He was born in 1884, almost twenty years after freedom came to the slaves of South Carolina.

In common with most children of the time, Fraser was illiterate. South Carolina no longer had laws that prevented slaves from learning to read or write, but the state's African American children were still expected to work rather than go to school. There were exceptions, of course: Claflin University, Benedict College, and Allen University had already been founded. Historian Charles Joyner quotes a former slave, Ben Horry, who understood the power of early literacy for each new generation of African Americans: "You had the learning in your head. Give me that pencil to catch up!" However, for a child like Fraser, education wasn't assumed. Then when he was ten years old something happened to change his life.

He was in the brush near his home, collecting firewood, when a tree fell the wrong way and broke his arm. According to family history, his stepmother didn't think the wound was serious, and didn't treat it properly. The wound then became badly infected. (This version may have been influenced by ten-year-old Fraser's feelings about his stepmother. They didn't get along. Maybe the wound became infected simply because Fraser was a young boy living in a swampy, rural area, and he didn't keep his arm clean.) The infection threatened to spread, which could have killed Fraser. A decision was made. His left arm was amputated.

Despite the tragedy, Fraser's spirits bounced back. His attitude would have been familiar to Michelle: It was the same attitude Fraser's grandson, her father, had about multiple sclerosis. Never complain about it. Never give in to it. Another family legacy.

A neighbor, Frank Nesmith, took notice of the young man. Fraser made himself Nesmith's sidekick.
In time, Nesmith asked Fraser's father, Jim, if Fraser could move in with the Nesmith family. It would give everyone a break from the conflicts between Fraser and his stepmother. Nesmith promised to take care of Fraser. Jim Robinson agreed.

Nesmith, about thirty years old, was married and had a young daughter. Government records from just a few years later, 1900, show the family living in downtown Georgetown. There were two Nesmith girls then, ages seven and one. Nesmith's occupation was listed as train conductor. Fraser, age sixteen, was listed as "house boy." (His last name was listed as "Roberson," as it would be in some government records for the next thirty years.) He still had not learned to read and write, but that would soon change.

Over the next decade, three more Nesmith girls would arrive, and all of them would attend school. Fraser noticed that Frank and his wife took school seriously. "They pushed their kids hard into education," Fraser's niece Carrie Nelson told
Washington Post
reporter Shailagh Murray. "One day Uncle Fraser would, too, because that's what he learned from them." Just as important: He taught himself to read and write. Mrs. Nesmith, probably helped him, but according to family history he mostly learned on his own. That's not easy to do, as four-year-old Michelle would discover many years later.

Fraser also took on new work—a lot of it. He had three jobs. One was at a lumber mill where Frank Nesmith had gone to work after leaving the railroad. The fast-growing Atlantic Coast Lumber Company had become the town's biggest employer, because few people were willing to work in the rice fields anymore. Fraser worked with the mill's kiln, the large oven where freshly cut boards were dried. He was also a shoemaker, and he sold newspapers on a street corner in Georgetown. One longtime resident of the city, Dorothy Taylor, told the
Washington Post
she remembered seeing him there when she was a student. For some reason, she knew that he always took his spare copies home and made sure his children read them—just like Michelle's mother brought home extra workbooks to keep Michelle and Craig ahead of their classes fifty years later.

Fraser's children included a son named Fraser Jr. This is Michelle's grandfather—the one she has come to South Carolina to visit. Fraser Jr. was the oldest of nine children. Government records from 1930 show that the five oldest, ranging from seventeen-year-old Fraser to a seven-year-old brother, had all absorbed Fraser Sr.'s lessons about education and could read and write. Only the infants in the family couldn't.

By the time Fraser Jr. was in his teens, his father had created a comfortable life for the large family. Fraser Jr. had done his part by excelling in school. He didn't go to college, however. By 1930, when he was eighteen, he was working in the lumber yard. The company now claimed to be the largest of its kind in the world, and it might have been. Its enormous factory produced hundreds of thousands of feet of boards a day, and its warehouse held millions of feet of lumber ready for shipment from the huge docks the company had built at Georgetown's port. It was one reason Fraser Sr. had been able to build a large home. Other family members, like Fraser Sr.'s brother, Gabriel, had also become comfortable thanks to work related to the lumber yard. Gabriel had bought a farm with his earnings. Fraser Jr. imagined the same success for himself. So he went to work.

Then the Great Depression began. By 1932, the Atlantic Coast Lumber Company was out of business.

Losing a job is bad enough, but for African Americans the Depression became dangerous in other ways. Racial violence had already increased during the previous few decades. It was now extreme.

The problem had begun about a dozen years after the Civil War ended. At the time, the former Confederate states were still under the legal control of the national government in Washington, D.C., which put the U.S. Army in charge. In a way, the southern states were being treated as if they had been foreign countries during the war. That was, after all, exactly how they had asked to be treated before they lost the war. The goal of Reconstruction, as the federal government's plan was called, was to set rules that the states could follow in order to govern themselves again and have a voice in Congress. These rules included protections for the rights of African Americans, such as the right to vote.

Reconstruction was strongly opposed in the South. The country's most notorious hate group, the Ku Klux Klan, was formed at this time. It was one of many white supremacy groups that sought to terrorize African Americans. An informal rebellion was taking place. This was a period of great violence against African Americans and whites who supported Reconstruction. Then Reconstruction suddenly ended, thanks to a political deal.

After the votes were counted in the 1876 presidential election, both the Democrats and the Republicans claimed victory. For several months, legal fights and political arguments dragged on. At the last minute, a deal was struck to give the presidency to the Republican candidate, Rutherford B. Hayes, whose support came from the North. In return, the former Confederate states, who had backed the Democratic candidate, got what they wanted in the first place: An agreement to end Reconstruction.

Soon old faces were back in power in the South. They immediately passed laws to take from African Americans the rights that were granted during Reconstruction. Voting rights were the first to go. They created elaborate rules designed specifically to exclude African Americans. Then they passed laws requiring segregation. In South Carolina, for example, it was illegal for a restaurant to serve whites and African Americans in the same room, even if the owner wanted to do so. These segregation laws were called "Jim Crow" laws, after an African American character in a music hall song.

The lowest moment in the history of Jim Crow may have come in 1913, when President Woodrow Wilson and members of his cabinet introduced segregation in the federal government. This ranged from building crude office partitions to the firing of African American employees. Just a little later in Michelle's story, another connection between her life and the turning points of American history will appear when becomes part of Woodrow Wilson's most cherished legacy, a university built on the same beliefs he brought to the presidency.

Voting rules and Jim Crow laws would be the target of the civil rights movement in the 1960s, but that was still a long way off for young men like Michelle's grandfather. In the decade or so before the lumber yard closed, attacks on African Americans had become extreme. African Americans who had served in World War I came home in 1919 imagining that new opportunities waited for them. They found a fresh wave of Ku Klux Klan members who feared successful African Americans and were ready to do violence. The KKK and other groups and mobs even killed African American soldiers in uniform. The summer of 1919 is called "Red Summer" because so many riots against African Americans broke out. The first one happened in Charleston, South Carolina, not far from Georgetown.