3

She’s what?” Alice Brown asked, the tone of her voice…

She’s what?” Alice Brown asked, the tone of her voice hovering somewhere between anxiety and outright panic. On the other end of the line, Catherine Donnelly was not at all surprised at her mother’s reaction. The Princeton University freshman imagined Alice, knuckles white as she gripped the phone, eyes wide with disbelief, her face turning an unsettling shade of crimson.

“Well, like I said, Mom,” Catherine continued, “she seems very nice, quite tall, smart, of course, pretty—beautiful, actually,” Catherine answered. “Her name is Michelle, she’s from Chicago…and she’s black.”

Growing up in Louisiana, Catherine had attended school with a few black students. But for Alice Brown, the idea of her daughter sharing the cramped, slope-ceilinged dorm room at Pyne Hall with Michelle Robinson and another student was something else again. Catherine’s mother had grown up in an unabashedly racist southern household, so Catherine braced for the worst.

Indeed, the possibility that her daughter might room with an African American during her first year at Princeton was something that Alice Brown had not even remotely considered. A financially strapped single mother who had poured her life into raising Catherine, Alice had always had big plans for her daughter. As far as she was concerned, they did not include a black roommate—much less one raised on the gritty South Side of Chicago by a working-class family.

Like Michelle’s family, Alice had made considerable sacrifices for her daughter. Convinced that a private school education would greatly improve Catherine’s chances of getting into a top college, Alice took a teaching job at one of New Orleans’s most exclusive private institutions so that Catherine could attend tuition-free. When Catherine was admitted to Princeton, it seemed as if every door was finally open to her. Alice wondered how many of those doors would now slam shut if her daughter was forced to share a room with a black girl. She also wondered if such a person might be a “bad influence” on Catherine.

“Mom just blew a gasket when I described Michelle,” Catherine would later recall. “It was my secret shame.”

Alice, who had driven Catherine up from New Orleans, didn’t stop there. No sooner did she hang up with her daughter than she marched straight to the student housing office. “I need to get my daughter’s room changed right away,” Alice demanded. “We’re from the South. We aren’t used to living with black people.”

When she was told that no other rooms were available, Alice, distraught, called her mother. “Take Catherine out of school immediately,” Catherine’s grandmother insisted. “Bring her home!”

Michelle was blissfully unaware of Alice Brown’s reaction or the frantic attempts Alice had made to arrange for her daughter to room with someone else—anyone else—as long, of course, as that person wasn’t black. Catherine certainly gave no hint of what was going on behind the scenes. She and “Miche,” as Michelle liked to be called, got along well enough.

“Michelle had these beautiful, long-fingered hands that she used to tell great stories with,” said Catherine, who, like Michelle, was seventeen at the time. “I loved her hands.”

The following semester, however, Catherine jumped at the chance to move out when a larger room became available. When she finally learned, some twenty-seven years later, of Alice Brown’s attempts to move her daughter out of their dorm room, Michelle would recall that she and Catherine were “never close. But sometimes that’s the thing you sense, that there’s something that’s there, but it’s often unspoken.” Once Catherine moved out, she and Michelle, who would soon be socializing almost exclusively with the few other blacks on campus, turned the other way when they passed each other on campus.

Catherine would certainly regret what had happened then, as would her mother. “Michelle early on began to hang out with other black students,” Catherine remembered. “Princeton was just a very segregated place. I wish now that I had pushed harder to be friends, but by the same token, she did not invite me to do things, either.”

Alice Brown’s machinations notwithstanding, it quickly became clear to Michelle, who enrolled at Princeton in the fall of 1981, that she and other minority students were not exactly being welcomed with open arms. Historically Princeton, with its broad emerald playing fields and imposing neo-Gothic architecture, was the very definition of resolute eastern elitism. Not even Woodrow Wilson, who was Princeton’s president prior to his election to the White House in 1912, believed blacks belonged there. “The whole temper and tradition of the place,” he wrote, “are such that no Negro has ever applied for admission, and it seems extremely unlikely that the question will ever assume a practical form.”

It was not until 1936 that a black man named Bruce Wright was admitted to Princeton, and then only because they initially believed him to be white. As soon as the administration realized its mistake, Wright was asked to leave.

By the late 1960s, a handful of African Americans had been admitted to the then all-male university. When Princeton went coeducational in 1969, a smattering of black women joined their ranks. Of the 1,141 students in her freshman class, Michelle was one of only 94 blacks.

As far as most of her white classmates were concerned, Michelle and the other African Americans at Princeton were beneficiaries of affirmative action programs and did not deserve to be there. It would be commonplace for white students to walk up to blacks and ask them their SAT scores point-blank. “The implication,” said Michelle’s classmate Lisa Rawlings, “was that I didn’t have the scores to get in, I didn’t have the grades to get in.”

Princeton itself only fueled the notion that the bar had been lowered for minority applicants. A few weeks before the school year began, black and Hispanic freshmen were invited to attend special classes designed to help them adjust to campus life. “We weren’t sure whether they thought we needed an extra start,” said fellow student Angela Acree, “or they just said, ‘Let’s bring all the black kids together.’”

Either way, the effect was to isolate minority kids from the rest of the student body. Michelle quickly gravitated to the other African Americans on campus, and by her sophomore year was sharing a suite with three other black women. “I cannot tell you,” Michelle’s classmate Lisa Rawlings recalled, “the number of times I was called ‘Brown Sugar.’ Definitely you got the feeling you didn’t belong.” Hilary Beard remembered how white students who had never been around blacks before “would want to touch [her] hair.”

For the most part, however, Michelle and her fellow African Americans on campus were merely ignored. “The same white kids you were in classes with,” Michelle said, “would pretend not to know you once class was over. They would just look the other way if you passed them on campus, or even cross the street to avoid you. It happened all the time.”

Angela Acree agreed. “White kids we knew from class would pass us on the green and pretend not to see us,” said Acree, whose closest friends at Princeton were Michelle and another black student, Suzanne Alele. “It was, like, here comes a black kid. It was a very sexist, segregated place.”

Michelle might have been less taken aback if her older brother, Craig, who had arrived at Princeton two years earlier on a basketball scholarship, had bothered to warn her. Certainly the mere fact that she was the sister of a Princeton basketball star paved the way for Michelle socially. And Craig was more than generous with his advice when it came to housing and classes and professors.

Craig and Michelle, who bore such a striking physical resemblance that they were often taken for twins, had always been close. So why hadn’t he cautioned his little sister about the racism that was pervasive on the Princeton campus? “We all viewed it as what you needed to do, to do business there,” Craig explained. He hadn’t wanted to discourage Michelle—or to cause his parents undue worry—by describing what he and the other blacks on campus had to endure on a daily basis. “You just,” he said, “had to put up with certain things.”

Back home in Chicago, Marian and Fraser Robinson were completely unaware of what their children were going through. “We had no idea, no inkling,” Marian later said. “After all, it was Princeton.”

To be sure, both children had known nothing but love, support, and encouragement growing up in a solid working-class neighborhood on Chicago’s mostly African American South Side—a world away from Hawaii, Indonesia, and Kenya.

In 1964, the same year Barack Obama’s parents divorced, twenty-nine-year-old Fraser Robinson III landed a job working the swing shift as a “station laborer” with Chicago’s water department. That meant he essentially worked as a janitor at the city’s water treatment plant, mopping, scrubbing, and scraping virtually every surface, cleaning the bathrooms, taking out the refuse, flushing drains, and doing whatever else it took to make his demanding foreman happy—all for six thousand dollars a year.

He was thrilled to get the job. Once a gifted high school athlete who excelled in boxing and swimming, the affable, energetic, relentlessly upbeat Fraser had just been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. Although the symptoms at this early stage of the disease were all but imperceptible, he knew that he would need the kind of steady employment with health benefits and a pension that the city government could provide.

For Marian Shields Robinson, news of her husband’s water company job came none too soon. Sweethearts since high school, where she had been a standout in track, Marian and Fraser wed in 1960. When their son, Craig, was born two years later, she quit her job as a secretary at the Sears Roebuck Catalog Company to take care of the baby. Now that she was pregnant again, Marian, twenty-six, worried that she might have to return to work to make ends meet.

On January 17, 1964—just three days after Fraser started his new job—Marian gave birth to a healthy baby girl. They named her Michelle LaVaughn (after Fraser’s mother), and, as originally planned, Marian continued staying home as a full-time mom.

The Robinsons breathed a collective sigh of relief knowing that Fraser’s salary could pay for their small apartment on South Parkway (later Martin Luther King Drive) in a solidly black part of the city. But that security came with a price. Having grown up the son of a government worker in Chicago, Fraser Robinson III knew all too well that Mayor Richard Daley’s fabled Democratic machine made sure all city jobs were doled out exclusively through an elaborate system of bribery, nepotism, and patronage.

It helped that Fraser was a committed Democrat. He volunteered as precinct captain—a powerful position on the grassroots level and an essential cog in the well-oiled Daley machine. There was one Democratic precinct captain in each of Chicago’s fifty wards, and it was their job to keep the party faithful happy. The Daley machine may have been one of the most violent, corrupt, and notoriously racist in modern American history, but no matter. As long as people like Fraser Robinson were there to make sure their streets were cleared of snow and the garbage was collected on time, Democrats, regardless of race or ethnic origin, would continue to vote Democratic.

African Americans, however, were particularly vulnerable to the pressures brought to bear by these foot soldiers in Richard Daley’s political army. Entire families could easily be intimidated by law enforcement, threatened with eviction from public housing, or told that whatever government payments they might be receiving would grind to a halt. “The Negroes always vote for us,” Daley once said in an infamous Freudian slip, “because they know what’ll happen to them if they don’t.”

By all accounts, Fraser was particularly effective as a precinct captain—a job he could perform, it seemed, without ever resorting to dirty tricks or intimidation. Well dressed and sporting a neatly trimmed mustache, Fraser was jovial, quick-witted, and sympathetic to his neighbors’ needs. And the more effective he was as a precinct captain, the more swiftly he rose through the ranks at the water department. In just five years, he would be promoted three times, rising to the position of operating engineer at twice his starting salary.

The Daley machine seemed light-years away from Friendfield, the South Carolina rice plantation where Jim Robinson, Michelle’s great-great-grandfather, was born into slavery around 1850. It was here, in South Carolina’s Low Country region northeast of Charleston, that thousands of slaves like Robinson worked the snake-infested fields that produced fully half the country’s crop of rice.

All that abruptly changed in the wake of the Civil War. Friendfield’s magnificent antebellum mansion was looted, its rice mill burned to the ground, and a smallpox epidemic swept through the region, killing blacks and whites alike.

Like many of the other newly emancipated slaves, Jim Robinson stayed to work the land as a sharecropper. In the 1880 census, he was listed as an illiterate farmhand and the married father of a three-year-old son named Gabriel. Four years later a second son, Fraser, was born.

When Gabriel and Fraser were still small, their mother died and their father quickly remarried. His new wife, however, considered her new stepsons little more than a nuisance. At the age of ten, Fraser had gone in search of firewood when a sapling fell on his left arm, shattering it. His stepmother, convinced that it was just a minor injury, refused to seek medical attention for him, gangrene set in, and by the time his stepmother finally summoned the doctor, all they could do to save his life was amputate.

Francis Nesmith, the white son of a plantation overseer, soon took Fraser under his wing. Eventually, Fraser moved into the Nesmith house, and, though officially listed in the 1900 census as a sixteen-year-old “house boy,” he was raised alongside Nesmith’s own children. While described as being illiterate at the time, Fraser would eventually teach himself to read.

Both of Jim Robinson’s sons flourished. Gabriel earned enough money as a laborer to buy his own farm. Fraser married Rosella Cohen, a local woman whose parents took the name Cohen from their Jewish slave owner, and they had several children.

To support his family, the one-armed man plied his trade as a shoemaker and earned extra money by working in a lumber mill and hawking newspapers. He always managed to take a few copies home each night so his children could improve their reading skills and learn something about the world in the process.

Born in 1912, Fraser junior was an outstanding student who excelled in public speaking. Yet after graduation from high school, he found himself scraping by working as a laborer at a local sawmill.

As the economy of the rural South continued its inexorable downhill slide, Fraser junior and his new wife, LaVaughn, joined the millions of other blacks who fled north in search of a better life. Fraser junior would be disappointed. For the next thirty years he toiled as a U.S. postal worker, earning just enough to afford a small apartment in one of Chicago’s ubiquitous public housing projects. When he retired in 1974, he and LaVaughn packed up and moved back to South Carolina.

(If Michelle Robinson’s family tree seemed lacking in variety compared with that of her future husband, it was worth noting that one of her first cousins was a rabbi. Capers C. Funnye Jr. converted from Methodism to Judaism and in 1985 founded Chicago’s mostly black Beth Shalom B’nai Zaken Ethiopian Hebrew Congregation. The only African American rabbi in the Chicago area recognized by the greater Jewish community, Funnye also became the first African American member of the Chicago Board of Rabbis and served on the board of the American Jewish Congress of the Midwest. Funnye, like most of the members of his congregation, believed that the original Israelites were black.)

Michelle was six when the family relocated to South Shore, a more affluent neighborhood that stretched along the southern border of Lake Michigan. Following the passage of the Fair Housing Act of 1968, the neighborhood had undergone a profound transformation as black families moved in and white families fled. The Robinsons watched as, one by one, South Shore’s few remaining white families packed up, waved good-bye, and left.

While this quiet exodus occurred without rancor—Marian remembered that there were no harsh words or overtly bad feelings between the whites who fled and the African Americans who stayed—the message was clear. “How do you think we felt?” a black neighbor said. “They were nice to our faces, but it was pretty clear we weren’t good enough to live next to.”

When Michelle and Craig asked their parents why all their white schoolmates were leaving, Marian and Fraser had no easy answers. They could not deny that racist sentiments had always run deep in Chicago and its suburbs; after being stoned by whites during a peaceful protest there in 1966, Martin Luther King said the racial hatred there was even more pernicious than what he’d witnessed in the Deep South.

Fraser and Marian conceded to their children that, even in their tight little community, racism still existed. But they also urged their children to shrug it off, to not be defined by what others thought of them, and to focus on making themselves the best people they could be. “You can’t grow up being a black kid and not be aware of racial issues,” Craig said. “Our parents always talked to us about it.”

While South Shore’s racial character had changed—by the late 1970s nearly all the white families had vanished—the quality of life it offered did not. When businesses like the local bank and the local supermarket threatened to pull out of South Shore, citizens banded together and pressured them to stay. Precinct captain Fraser and others with political clout made sure city services were not curtailed as they had been in other black communities, and parents lobbied aggressively for funds to keep their schools among the best in the state.

The undeniable sense of civic pride among the residents of South Shore was mirrored inside the Robinson home, on the top floor of a dormered two-story redbrick bungalow at 7436 South Euclid Avenue. There the Robinsons were crammed into three small rooms occupying less than one thousand square feet. Mom and Dad occupied the sole bedroom, and what would have been the living room was divided with plywood panels into three parts—Craig’s room, Michelle’s room, and between them a communal study area.

Notwithstanding the cramped quarters, the Robinsons led a reasonably secure life surrounded by uncles, aunts, cousins, and a wide assortment of family friends who dropped in to watch sports on TV, barbecue burgers in the backyard, or spend the evening listening to Motown and jazz. Cosseted in this warm and nurturing environment, Michelle was to a great extent shielded from the sting of prejudice and inequality. Even though many in their circle were devoutly religious, the Robinsons were at best infrequent churchgoers. “We believed,” Marian explained, “that how you live your life every day was the most important thing.”

Sunday visits to her grandparents, who lived nearby in public housing, opened Michelle’s eyes to what life was like for blacks in the rural South. Fraser junior and Michelle’s namesake, LaVaughn, spoke wistfully of Georgetown County in South Carolina, though Fraser never mentioned Friendfield Plantation or that his own grandfather had once been a slave there. Still, Michelle would later recall, Fraser junior “was a very proud man. He was proud of his lineage. At the same time, there was a discontent about him.” Indeed, she said, both her father and grandfather were “bright, articulate, well-read men. If they’d been white, they would have been the heads of banks.”

After Fraser junior moved back to South Carolina, Michelle was a frequent visitor. The heat, the Spanish moss, the dusty roads, and the nighttime din of crickets and frogs that made sleeping impossible would all be burned into Michelle’s memory. So, too, was the memory of the wrought-iron gate and the road beyond it that the Robinsons always passed without comment—the road that led to Friendfield.

That Marian and Fraser III were willing to forgo having a living room so that their children would have their own rooms and a place to do their schoolwork spoke volumes about the premium they put on education. Michelle’s parents had both been bright enough to skip a grade in elementary school, and they certainly had the grades to get into a reputable college. But Fraser, who had grown up poor in the projects, did not see college as an option, and although Marian’s mother had wanted her to become a teacher, she went to work straight out of high school as a secretary instead. “That’s because being a teacher was her dream, not mine,” Marian said. “I didn’t like being told what to do. I really wanted to be a secretary. I liked being a secretary.”

Still, Fraser and Marian wanted the best for their children, and they knew that education was the key. “The academic part came first and early in our house,” Craig said. “Our parents emphasized hard work and doing your best, and once you get trained like that, then you get used to it and you don’t want to get anything but As and Bs.”

Marian had actually managed to teach both her children to read by the time they turned four, although Michelle balked at first. “She thought she could figure out how to read on her own,” Marian said, “but she was too young to say that, so she just ignored me.”

Michelle “had her head on straight very early,” her mother recalled. “She raised herself from about nine years old.”

Well before then, the Robinsons had taken pains to instill self-discipline in Michelle and Craig. The day before they started kindergarten, Marian gave both children alarm clocks. “You are becoming responsible for your life,” she told them. “You have to see that you get up and give yourself enough time to eat breakfast and get yourself ready.” But while Craig sprang into action when his alarm went off, Michelle just asked him to roust her out of bed when he was finished using the bathroom. At first Marian was miffed at her daughter’s response. But she quickly changed her mind. After all, she said, Michelle’s plan to get as much sleep as possible before the bathroom became available “was smart. It worked.”

There were plenty of other character-building pursuits for the Robinson kids. Every Saturday, Michelle cleaned the bathroom. She alternated kitchen duties with Craig; he washed the dishes Monday, Wednesday, and Friday while she took Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday. Mom stepped in to do the dishes on Sunday.

Their access to television was limited to one hour per day—although somehow Michelle still managed to commit to memory every single episode of The Brady Bunch (The Dick Van Dyke Show and The Mary Tyler Moore Show were also personal favorites). That left plenty of time for trying out recipes in her child-size Easy Bake Oven and playing with her Barbies, which included Barbie’s African American friend, Christie; Barbie’s boyfriend, Ken; Barbie’s pink Corvette; and of course Barbie’s Malibu mansion.

The Robinsons’ one extravagance: driving the 180 miles to White Cloud, Michigan, for a week’s stay at Duke’s Happy Holiday Resort, a vacation destination popular with African American families in the Chicago area. For the most part, however, they stuck close to home—and to each other. There were family games of Monopoly, Chinese checkers, and a game involving spoons called Hands Down. “My sister is a poor sport—she really does hate to lose,” said Craig, who claimed he periodically threw games of Monopoly because he had to let her “win enough so that she wouldn’t quit.”

Michelle was driven to succeed from the beginning. “She wanted to do the right thing all the time without being told,” Marian said, “and she wanted to be the best at things. She liked winning.”

Often the only person Michelle was competing with was herself. Once she began taking piano lessons from her great-aunt, Michelle threw herself into the process with such gusto that she exhausted herself and everyone around her. Michelle would come home from school and, without being asked, go straight to the piano and start practicing. Hours later, she would still be at the keyboard pounding away—until her frazzled mom finally ordered her to stop.

A bossy streak also surfaced early on. When they played “office,” Michelle insisted that Craig be the businessman while she played the secretary. Then Michelle, with her chubby cheeks, pigtails, and a cute chipmunk overbite, proceeded to take on every responsibility so that in the end her older brother “had absolutely nothing to do.”

Michelle took charge on the playground, as well. “I wouldn’t say she ran roughshod over her friends,” Craig said, “but she was sort of the natural leader.”

If her friends were willing to let her run things, it might have been because she was always considered one of the smartest kids in the neighborhood. “As far back as any of us can remember,” Craig said, “she was very bright.” Like her brother, Michelle skipped the second grade. “She didn’t ever come home with grades that weren’t the best,” Marian said. “She always wanted to do her best, and I don’t think it had anything to do with outdoing someone else. It’s within her.”

That drive to succeed, and the values that would guide her, stemmed in part from long conversations over the family dinner table. “Thinking was the big deal—you had to think,” Marian recalled. “You want your kids early on to start making decisions on their own. You want them to make good decisions, but when they make mistakes you want it to be a learning experience. I think that gives kids a lot of confidence. I really did raise my children by ear, day by day.”

Yet, in the Robinson household, parental authority was strictly observed. With Dad away at work, Mom functioned as chief disciplinarian—a position that sometimes required her to administer the infrequent spanking. Dad never had to resort to anything more than a solemn pronouncement. “I’m disappointed,” he would say, and Craig and Michelle would flee the room in tears.

“We always felt we couldn’t let Dad down because he worked so hard for us,” Craig said. “My sister and I, if ever one of us 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?” Agreed Michelle, “You never wanted to disappoint him. We would be bawling.”

If at times they seemed like stern taskmasters, the life lesson they taught their children was an overwhelmingly positive one. “When you grow up as a black kid in a white world,” Michelle’s brother said, “so many times people are telling you, sometimes not maliciously, sometimes maliciously, you’re not good enough. To have a family, which we did, who constantly reminded you how smart you were, how good you were, how pleasant it was to be around you, how successful you could be, it’s hard to combat. Our parents gave us a head start by making us feel confident.”

Confidence was something Michelle had in abundance. Unlike her five-foot-eight-inch-tall mother, who hunched over as a teenager because she was self-conscious about her then-taller-than-average height, Michelle would always stand ramrod straight—even when she grew to her full height of five feet eleven inches. “I made sure she didn’t do what I did,” Marian said. “I even walked bent over…. Michelle didn’t carry herself like it was any of her concern.”

Nor did Michelle ever hesitate to speak her mind—a trait that delighted her mother. “I always resented it when I could not say what I felt,” Marian remembered. “I always felt, “What’s wrong with me for not saying what I feel?” Michelle always had her opinions about things and she didn’t hesitate to say so, because we allowed it.”

Michelle also displayed a quick temper, occasionally confronting other children when she thought they misbehaved. “If somebody made noise in class, she’d whirl around and ‘sssshhh’ you,” recalled a fellow student at Bryn Mawr Public Elementary School (later renamed Bouchet Academy). “If somebody was shoving somebody or being mean, she’d tell them to stop. Michelle always had a strong sense of what was right and wrong, and sometimes she’d be a tattletale.” Observed Marian, “If it’s not right, she’s going to say so.”

As insistent as Michelle was about everyone following the rules, she was not above challenging her teachers, particularly if she thought she deserved a better grade. She made no effort to conceal her displeasure when things didn’t go her way. When a teacher complained that Michelle was having trouble controlling her anger at school, Marian laughed. “Yeah, she’s got a temper all right,” her mom said. “But we decided to keep her anyway.”

Marian and Fraser had always encouraged Michelle to ask questions. “Make sure you respect your teachers,” Marian told her children, “but don’t hesitate to question them. Don’t even allow us to just say anything to you. Ask us why.”

At age ten—toward the end of a two-year stretch where, inexplicably, she insisted on eating only peanut butter and jelly sandwiches—Michelle was admitted to the gifted program at Bryn Mawr Elementary. The following year, she and her gifted classmates were taking biology classes at Kennedy-King College, dissecting rodents in one of the college’s labs. “This is not,” said her friend Chiaka Davis Patterson, “what normal seventh graders were getting.”

She may have stood tall, but Michelle learned at about this time that standing out was not always a good thing. With those around her getting far fewer opportunities and often facing hardships at home, Michelle taught herself to, as she put it, “speak two languages”—one to adults and close friends, another to the general population of students. “If I’m not going to get my butt kicked every day after school,” she said, “I can’t flaunt my intelligence in front of peers who are struggling with a whole range of things…. You’ve got to be smart without acting smart.”

The local public high school was just one block away from their apartment, but the Robinsons had no intention of sending either of their children there. “We were always driven and we were always encouraged to do the best you can do, not just what’s necessary,” Michelle’s brother said. “So naturally we wanted to go to the best schools we could.”

Craig was dispatched to Chicago’s Mount Carmel High, a parochial school that was famous for turning out basketball champions who went on to land athletic scholarships. At six feet six inches, Craig quickly distinguished himself as one of the best players the school had ever seen.

A huge opportunity opened up for Michelle in 1975, when the Chicago Board of Education established the Whitney M. Young Magnet High School in the city’s West Loop. Aimed at attracting high-achieving students of all races, Whitney Young—named after the longtime executive director of the Urban League—was supposed to be 40 percent black, 40 percent Caucasian, and 20 percent “other.” As it turned out, it was 70 percent African American when Michelle arrived. Still, it offered the best college prep courses available, as well as classrooms and facilities that rivaled those of any prep school in the nation. In addition to the usual AP and honors courses, the Whitney M. Young Magnet School had an arrangement with the University of Illinois that allowed Whitney Young students to take courses there for full college credit.

Within months of Whitney Young’s opening, Michelle enrolled in the ninth grade. Instead of strolling up the block to public high school, she would have to get up extra early each morning to catch a bus and then a train into the city—a trip that usually took about an hour, sometimes two.

The trek was well worth it. Surrounded by other earnest but friendly overachievers, Michelle fit right in. She took AP and honors courses, made the honor roll all four years, earned membership in the National Honor Society, performed ballet in school dance recitals, and summoned the courage to speak before hundreds of her classmates when she ran for student council and then for senior class treasurer. (She won that office by a single vote.)

Athletic, long-limbed Michelle might also have been expected to play sports in high school—basketball in particular. After all, her brother was already on the fast track to a basketball scholarship. “As she got older, because she was tall and black, people assumed she played basketball,” Craig said. “She hated that. She would never do anything because other people think it’s the right thing to do.” That extended to all varsity sports. “Telling her to do something—that’s the best way to get her not to do something,” Craig added. “She didn’t want to play just because she was tall and black and athletic.” Sniffed Michelle: “Tall women can do other things.”

But when it came to her brother’s basketball career, he had no bigger fan than Michelle. Before Craig played in a game, he recalled, “Michelle would play the piano just to calm [him] down. It usually worked.” Michelle was so close to her brother, however, that she would walk out of a game if his team was losing, because she could not bear to watch.

With her megawatt smile, her almost regal bearing, and a casual wardrobe usually consisting of jeans worn with a crisp white shirt, Michelle cut a striking figure at school. The fact that she was one of the tallest girls at Whitney Young also made her stand out.

Perhaps her closest friend during this period was the Reverend Jesse Jackson’s daughter Santita, who had grown up in a slightly more upscale part of South Shore and met Michelle in 1977 when they were both thirteen. Later, when they got their driver’s licenses, Michelle and Santita carpooled together.

“Michelle was pretty much liked by everybody,” said one Whitney Young alumnus who knew both young women. “Michelle and Santita were really tight. Santita wanted to be a singer, and Michelle, well, you knew she wanted to do something big with her life. So it seemed to the rest of us that they belonged together—two special people.”

She may have favorably impressed her peers. But, surrounded as she was by so many academic superstars, Michelle made little impression on most of her teachers. When she did manage to grab their attention, it was often as a result of her desire to right a wrong she felt had been done to her.

One afternoon, Michelle took a typing test and hammered out enough words per minute to warrant being given an A. When her teacher gave her a B+ instead, Michelle objected. She pointed to the chart on the wall that clearly showed she deserved an A. But the teacher refused to acknowledge the mistake, and Michelle refused to back down. “She badgered and badgered that teacher,” her mother recalled. In the end, Marian wound up calling the school. “Look,” she warned the beleaguered typing instructor, “Michelle is not going to let this go.” Michelle got her A.

But what really impressed her fellow students was the fact that, in the words of her classmate Norm Collins, Michelle “seemed to conquer everything effortlessly.” In reality, Michelle usually struggled with tests. “She was disappointed in herself,” said Marian, who believed that Michelle had a psychological block when it came to tests because “she was hardworking and she had a brother who could pass a test just by carrying a book under his arm. When you are around someone like that, even if you are okay, you want to be as good or better.”

In stark contrast to the situation at many private prep schools across the country, alcohol and drugs were by all accounts not widespread at Whitney Young during Michelle’s time there. Most extracurricular fun outside of sports revolved around such quaint 1950s-era activities as dances, carwash fund-raisers, and the occasional frenzied food fight. “Compared to what was going on in other schools,” said a Whitney Young alumnus, “we were a pretty tame bunch.”

As popular as Michelle was among the girls at Whitney Young, her sunny disposition and toothsome good looks meant that she also seldom lacked for male attention. Unfortunately for the boys who pursued her, Michelle was “difficult to impress,” her mother said. Agreed Craig, “She didn’t suffer fools.” As a result, he added, “Michelle never really had any serious, long-term boyfriends.”

The reason for Michelle’s hard-to-get act was obvious to anyone who witnessed the relationship she had with her father. She watched her father set the bar impossibly high as he struggled each day with the debilitating symptoms of multiple sclerosis. “My dad was my dad,” Craig said. “And so she had a definite frame of reference for a guy. She had an imprint in her mind of the kind of guy she wanted.”

Michelle bristled when Craig joked that she was looking for someone who didn’t exist. What she was looking for in a guy, she said, was intelligence, hard work, “and some guts.” Michelle later said, “In my house there were no miracles. All I saw was hard work and sacrifice. My father did not complain and went to work every single day.”

In the middle of her junior year at Whitney Young, Michelle did start going out with a family friend she’d known since she was a toddler. “I grew up with Michelle and Craig,” David Upchurch said. “We were neighbors, and our families were close.”

Not coincidentally, Upchurch—tall, athletic, and already sporting a mustache at seventeen—bore more than a passing resemblance to Fraser Robinson. But even though the couple dated on and off for the next eighteen months, nothing serious would come of it. Apparently Upchurch failed to live up to her dad’s formidable example. “Michelle and I really liked each other,” Upchurch said, “but you know how some high school boys are. We’re not ready to be responsible and we screw up. I was a screwup, plain and simple!”

Even then, he said, “Michelle knew what she wanted. She was off to college. I didn’t take my future seriously, and I couldn’t stand in her way.”

Before they parted ways, Upchurch did take Michelle to the senior prom. In keeping with her growing reputation as something of a fashion plate, Michelle wore a floor-length beige silk gown with a plunging neckline and a provocative slit up the side.

Her family’s modest means aside, Michelle developed a taste for the finer things early on. She was adamant, however, that her parents not be faced with footing the bill.

“What’s that?” Marian asked one afternoon, eying the stylish leather purse slung over her teenage daughter’s shoulder. Marian reached over to touch it. “Is that a Coach bag?”

“Yes,” Michelle answered matter-of-factly. “I bought it with my babysitting money.”

“You bought a Coach bag with your babysitting money?” Marian said, flabbergasted. “How much was that?”

When Michelle told her the purse cost nearly three hundred dollars, Marian chided her for her extravagance. “Yes, Mom,” she explained calmly. “But you’re going to buy ten or twelve purses over the next few years, and all I need is this one.”

Surveying the pile of old purses on the floor of her closet, Marian later came to the conclusion that her daughter had been right. “She did have that purse for quite a while, and I…didn’t.”

Money was no object, however, when it came to her children’s education. When Craig had to choose between going to the University of Washington on a full scholarship or paying full tuition at Princeton University, his father was adamant that he choose the Ivy League school. “Go to the best school,” Fraser told both his children. “Don’t worry about the money. We’ll find a way.”

As much as he loved basketball, Craig had his eye on a Wall Street career. So for him, the choice was obvious. “No disrespect to the other schools,” Michelle’s brother mused, “but Wall Street doesn’t happen if I’m not at Princeton. Sorry…”

Over the next two years, Michelle visited Craig at Princeton and dreamed of someday joining him there. But back at Whitney Young, she received little encouragement. “Every step of the way,” she said, “there was somebody there telling me what I couldn’t do…. No one talked to me about going to Princeton or Harvard—or even going to college.” Told by counselors that her SAT scores and her grades weren’t good enough for an Ivy League school, Michelle applied to Princeton and Harvard anyway.

“Princeton, the Ivy Leagues, swoop up kids like Craig,” Michelle said. “A black kid from the South Side of Chicago that plays basketball and is smart. He was getting in everywhere. But I knew him, and I knew his study habits, and I was, like, ‘I can do that, too.’”

It didn’t hurt, of course, that her brother was already a student there—not just any student, but one who was on his way to being one of the leading scorers in Ivy League history. Undoubtedly aided by her status as a “legacy”—an applicant who is related to either a current student or an alumnus—Michelle was admitted to Princeton in 1981.

With Fraser Robinson scarcely pulling down thirty-five thousand a year from his job at the water filtration plant, Marian went back to work after Michelle graduated from high school. The money she earned as an administrative assistant in the trust division of a bank would go almost entirely toward paying the roughly fourteen thousand dollars annually it was costing to send Craig to Princeton. Now that Michelle was going there, too, the cost was doubled—the sum total being more than their father’s gross annual income. Michelle’s college education would have to be financed almost entirely with student loans.

Given the magnitude of her parents’ sacrifice, Michelle was not about to complain to them about the racist attitudes she was encountering at Princeton. “She didn’t talk about it,” Marian said. If her daughter “did feel different from other people, she didn’t let it bother her.”

In truth, Michelle was deeply troubled by the way she and other black students were treated. “I sometimes feel like a visitor on campus,” she later wrote, “as if I really don’t belong. Regardless of the circumstances under which I interact with whites at Princeton, it often seems as if, to them, I will always be black first and a student second.” Consequently, said Michelle, her undergraduate days “made me far more aware of my ‘Blackness’ than ever before.”

Princeton’s social hierarchy, built around its elite eating clubs, served only to alienate Michelle and her African American friends even more. Functioning like fraternities and sororities, these elegantly appointed clubs were housed in imposing mansions along the campus’s main thoroughfare, Prospect Avenue.

Even if she had been admitted into an eating club, Michelle knew she would have been uncomfortable there. Instead, she divided her time between the less exclusive and decidedly more affordable dining facilities in Stevenson Hall and the Third World Center, a social club set up by the university expressly for nonwhites on campus.

Although some students balked at its name—“We were Americans, not foreign exchange students from some underdeveloped country,” said one—the Third World Center, housed in a nondescript redbrick building, was one of the few places where Michelle could feel at home in the company of other African American Princetonians.

Michelle and her African American friends agreed that they only felt truly comfortable when they could go home and spend time with family. The next best thing was congregating with other blacks on campus—all but a handful of whom admitted to feeling the same social ostracism Michelle was experiencing. “The Third World Center was our life,” said Michelle’s pal Angela Acree. “We hung out there, we partied there, we studied there.” Classmate Laurent Robinson-Brown concurred: “We were each other’s support system.”

Michelle, who majored in sociology with a minor in African American studies, took an active role at the TWC, serving on its board and at one point running its after-school program for the children of Princeton’s maintenance and lunchroom crews. Michelle’s countless hours of self-imposed practice on the piano paid off when she played for children at the school each afternoon. Jonathan Brasuell, who was a second grader at the time, would recall a quarter century later how Michelle played the Peanuts theme for him. “I could not go through a week,” he said, “without hearing that.”

The TWC also gave Michelle an opportunity to vent as a member of its Black Thoughts Table, a no-holds-barred discussion group on the topic of race. She also joined a group called the Organization of Black Unity, which had as its unofficial headquarters the Third World Center. Among other things, the Organization of Black Unity arranged for speakers and programs aimed at Princeton’s small African American population.

Michelle had plenty of complaints about the way things were done at Princeton, and not all of them had to do with race. She was a vocal critic of the language program. “But you’re teaching French all wrong,” she told one of her teachers. “It’s not conversational enough.” Craig winced when he heard what Michelle had said. “All you can do,” he said, “is pretend you don’t know her.”

Eager to contribute to fund-raising efforts at the Third World Center, Michelle took part in two fashion shows. In one, to benefit the TWC’s after-school program, she modeled a canary yellow Caribbean peasant skirt. For a “Secret Fantasy”–themed show to benefit the Ethiopian Relief Fund, she walked down the runway in a sleeveless red velvet ball gown.

Raising awareness was one thing, but rocking the boat was quite another. There were student protests against apartheid and over Princeton’s investments in South Africa. Not only did Michelle decline to take part in any of these demonstrations, but she did not show up when her South Side neighbor Jesse Jackson appeared on campus to speak.

Like many other students, Michelle did not want to risk being arrested at one of these events. “Remember, most of us black students had no social safety net,” said classmate Hilary Beard. “You had an opportunity to change the arc of your life, and you were not going to mess it up.”

Besides, race was not the only thing that separated Michelle and her friends from Princeton’s in crowd. Far from it. “Of course it was different being black,” she said. “It was also different not being filthy rich. At the end of the year, these limos would come to get kids, and me and my brother would be carrying our cardboard boxes down to the train station.”

Although there was no shortage of students at Princeton receiving some sort of financial aid, the university was still populated to a large extent by the sons and daughters of the well-to-do. As a group, they summered on Nantucket or in the Hamptons, competed at crew, lacrosse, or tennis, and paid hefty fees to park their Jeeps, Land Rovers, and Porsches on campus. They often knew how to land the largest suites in the most desirable residence halls, and their parents would often spare no expense in decorating them.

Around campus, Michelle did what she could to keep up appearances. “Michelle was always fashionably dressed, even on a budget,” Angela Acree said. “You wouldn’t catch her in sweats, even back then.” But when it came to their living conditions, Michelle and her three roommates had few options. “We were not rich,” Acree said. “A lot of kids had TVs and sofas and chairs. We didn’t. We couldn’t afford any furniture, so we just had pillows on the floor, and a stereo.” To make matters worse, Michelle and her three roommates had to walk down three flights of stairs to use their dormitory’s only bathroom.

Michelle’s stereo would prove to be a magnet for other African Americans on campus, many drawn to hear her extensive collection of Stevie Wonder records. Music was just one more thing that separated the races at Princeton. While the vast majority of the student body leaned heavily toward the white-bread likes of Van Halen, Hall and Oates, The Police, Blondie, and Billy Joel, Michelle’s group preferred R&B, Motown, reggae, and rap.

“The white people didn’t dance—I know that sounds like a cliché—and they also played a completely different kind of music,” Acree said. “Whereas we were playing Luther Vandross and Run-DMC.”

Michelle never allowed such distractions to get in the way of work; unlike so many college students, she did not wait until the last minute to write a paper or cram for an exam. “She was not a procrastinator,” Acree observed. Instead, Michelle did her work in advance so that she would not be facing down a deadline the following day. But within the narrow confines of their sparsely furnished dorm room—where they felt free to be themselves—Michelle and her girlfriends traded gossip and, Acree said, “giggled and laughed hysterically.”

For Michelle, romance would not figure into the Princeton equation. Craig Robinson blamed himself. During the two years they overlapped at Princeton, Michelle was to some extent overshadowed by her big brother the basketball star. “I may have scared them off without even knowing it at the time,” Craig speculated.

In Craig’s defense, Michelle actually sent prospective boyfriends to play basketball with her brother. “You can tell an awful lot about someone by the way they play,” Craig said. “She wanted me to size them up and report back.”

Whatever the reason, no one asked Michelle out during her freshman and sophomore years. She fared only slightly better in her last two years at Princeton. Once again, the few young men who did ask her out seldom advanced to a second date. If there was a Robinson man to blame for this, it wasn’t Craig. “Dad again,” he said. “No one could live up to him in her eyes.” Indeed, Michelle still took such emotional sustenance from her father that, on visits home from college, she unhesitatingly curled up in his lap.

As her four years at Princeton drew to a close, she seemed more torn than ever about her experience there. She addressed the problem head-on in her senior thesis, arguing that, at least for now, true inclusion by whites was beyond the reach of even those African Americans educated at Ivy League universities. Throughout the thesis, as if to emphasize the significance of racial identity, she capitalized the words Black and White.

“Earlier in my college career,” she wrote in “Princeton-Educated Blacks and the Black Community,” “there was no doubt in my mind that as a member of the Black community I was somehow obligated to this community and would utilize all of my present and future resources to benefit this community first and foremost.” But, she continued, “as I enter my final year at Princeton, I find myself striving for many of the same goals as my White classmates…. The path I have chosen…will likely lead to my further integration and/or assimilation into a White cultural and social structure that will only allow me to remain on the periphery of society; never becoming a full participant.” This realization, Michelle then explained, served only to strengthen her resolve to do something for her fellow African Americans.

Michelle dedicated her thesis to the important people in her life: “Mom, Dad, Craig and all of my special friends. Thank you for loving me and always making me feel good about myself.”

Even before her senior year, Michelle had begun to map out a career path for herself. Already adept at networking—she had carefully cultivated friendships with some of the best and brightest at Princeton—Michelle visited the university’s career services office and pored over a list of alumni willing to give career advice.

She ran her slender finger down the list of alumni in the Chicago area and stopped at the name of Stephen Carlson. Noting that he was a partner in the heavyweight corporate law firm Sidley & Austin (which boasted of once having Mary Todd Lincoln as a client), Michelle wrote to Carlson. But instead of advice, she asked him point-blank for a summer job.

Unfortunately, summer jobs in law firms were invariably reserved for law school students. But Carlson was so impressed by Michelle’s chutzpah that he wrote back with a list of legal aid organizations in Chicago that did hire undergraduates to do research. Following Carlson’s lead, Michelle spent that summer working part-time at a legal aid agency not far from her parents’ South Side home.

Back at Princeton, Michelle agonized over what to do following graduation. “The question was, were you a traitor to your race for going to a white-dominated school at all,” mused another black Princetonian. “Michelle had crossed that threshold in going to Princeton. But she was concerned as she considered law school, is it still an okay thing to do?”

By the time she graduated cum laude from Princeton, Michelle had convinced herself that she would need a law degree if she was to make a real contribution to the black community in Chicago. Once again, her parents told her to ignore the cost. “It would be foolish,” said Fraser, who now walked with the aid of two canes, “to get this far in your education and wind up going to a second-rate law school.”

When she arrived on the Cambridge, Massachusetts, campus of Harvard University in the fall of 1984, Michelle stepped into an environment not unlike the one she had just left. The division between whites and nonwhites—and between haves and have-nots—was clearly drawn. Once again, the student body was top-heavy with what Michelle disparagingly called “rich kids,” and the law school faculty was straight out of The Paper Chase—dour-faced white men in plaid blazers with patches on the elbows, all waiting to pounce on those students unwise enough to show up in class unprepared.

Most galling for Michelle was the continuing assumption that the standards had been lowered to allow her and other black students in. While she had no reason to believe that was the case, other black students acknowledged that it might well have been. Michelle “realized that she had been privileged by affirmative action,” said her friend and classmate Verna Williams, “and she was very comfortable with that.”

As she had at Princeton, Michelle became involved in the leading African American organization on campus—the Black Law Students Association—and wrote for the BlackLetter Law Journal, an alternative to the Harvard Law Review aimed at minority students. She also signed petitions demanding that there be greater minority representation on the faculty. But beyond that, Michelle demurred when asked to take part in protests or demonstrations that might result in disciplinary action or arrest.

Within the confines of the Black Law Students Association, Michelle was not reluctant to speak out on racial issues. “We got into big debates on the condition of black folks in America,” Verna Williams said. “She’s got a temper.” When the subject of race came up elsewhere, however, Michelle usually remained quiet. “She kept her feelings to herself most of the time,” another friend said, “because she didn’t want to be pigeonholed as just another angry black person. She didn’t want to be defined solely by her race. Michelle had lots to say about lots of other things.”

That was particularly evident in David B. Wilkins’s course on the legal profession. During each class, Professor Wilkins grilled students on how they would behave when confronted with an ethical dilemma. “Not surprisingly,” Wilkins said, “many students shy away from putting themselves on the line in this way, preferring to hedge their bets or deploy technical arguments that seem to absolve them from the responsibilities of decision making.” Not Ms. Robinson. “Michelle,” Wilkins continued, “had no need for such fig leaves. She always stated her position clearly and decisively.”

That ability so impressed Verna Williams that she asked Michelle to be her partner in a mock trial. “She had incredible presence,” Williams said. “She was very, very smart, very charismatic, very well spoken.”

A student who possessed these gifts might have been expected to go straight to the Harvard Law Review, a traditional path to a Supreme Court clerkship or, at the very least, a job with one of the nation’s top law firms. Instead, Michelle chose to spend whatever time she could outside the classroom toiling in the cluttered offices of the school’s legal aid bureau.

Like the other students who chose to participate, Michelle pledged to devote a minimum of twenty hours each week to handling the legal woes of the Boston area’s poor population. Michelle helped out in the bureau’s divorce clinic, worked at hammering out settlements in child custody disputes, and fought to obtain various benefits for people who had been denied them. But housing issues consumed most of Michelle’s time at the bureau. Having seen so many of her Chicago neighbors struggle to pay the rent, she fought hard for families facing eviction or suffering at the hands of an unscrupulous landlord.

Many of her colleagues who came from more affluent backgrounds were witnessing urban poverty up close for the first time. A few, tired and frustrated, became emotional. Michelle, who had little patience for such self-indulgent displays, waited until she was back in her residence hall to vent her frustration. “Oh, puh-leeze,” Michelle complained to one of her African American classmates. “Do you think these people want to hear some rich white girl crying? They’ve got real problems. Give me a break!”

Michelle’s legal aid experience was the most rewarding of her academic career and seemed to point to a future in public service. The thrust of the Harvard Law School curriculum, however, was decidedly in the direction of corporate law. Toward that end, she followed Chicago lawyer Stephen Carlson’s advice and spent the summer following her second year working for Carlson’s high-powered law firm, Sidley & Austin.

As she approached graduation, Michelle faced a hard reality: she had massive student loans to repay, and her parents, who had sacrificed so much to send both children to Ivy League schools, were deeply in debt. When Sidley & Austin, then the fifth-largest law firm in the world, offered Michelle a job with a starting salary of nearly seventy thousand dollars (the equivalent of around a hundred thousand in 2009), she grabbed it. “The idea of making more money than both your parents combined ever made,” she later said, “is one you don’t walk away from.”

“She came to Harvard Law School with no ambiguity about her race or gender,” said her law school adviser, Charles Ogletree. Michelle had decided that she “would navigate corporate America, but never forget her father’s values or where she came from.”

In the summer of 1988, Michelle moved back into her parents’ tiny apartment on South Euclid Avenue and began making the daily commute to Sidley & Austin’s offices in the Loop. Within a week she asked to be assigned to the firm’s intellectual property group. Compared with such humdrum subdisciplines as antitrust or contract law, intellectual property (along with entertainment and marketing law) involved representing a wide variety of high-profile clients, from TV production companies, clothing manufacturers, radio stations, and breweries to record producers, advertising agencies, and sports figures.

As a result, the mood was usually upbeat in the intellectual property corridor, where lawyers read scripts as well as briefs and occasionally lunched with celebrity clients. Michelle, however, picked this area of the law over the others for more practical reasons: since there were only a few lawyers assigned to the intellectual property group, she stood a greater chance of making an impression—and advancing more quickly through the ranks.

Michelle was, in a word, ambitious. Not merely ambitious but, said Quincy White, her boss at the time, “quite possibly the most ambitious associate I’ve ever seen.” From the outset, she demanded—and got—plum assignments that otherwise would have gone to more senior members of the firm.

When the firm was hired to handle the legal affairs of a beloved children’s TV character named Barney, Michelle jumped at the chance. For the next year, she hammered out deals with stations that wanted to air the wildly popular show and oversaw the marketing of stuffed toys based on the talkative purple dinosaur and his sidekick, Baby Bop.

That was not enough for Michelle, however, so once again she complained to her superiors and was handed another plum client—Coors beer. Notwithstanding the fact that the Coors account was considered one of the most interesting, challenging, and of course visible assignments any lawyer at the firm could hope for, Michelle soon grew restless. No job the firm could give her, White later reflected, would satisfy Michelle’s overriding “ambition to change the world.”

Something was indeed missing from Michelle’s life—something that no job could fill. Still living at home at a time when most of her childhood friends had moved on, Michelle seldom socialized with her coworkers and dated only sporadically. Her job at Sidley & Austin had become her life.

Meanwhile, the rest of the Robinsons were busy wringing their hands over Michelle’s chances of ever having a serious relationship. “Oh, my god,” Craig told his parents, “my sister’s never getting married, because each guy she meets, she’s going to chew him up, spit him out.”

Whenever she did go out once or twice with a guy, she wound up, in Craig’s words, “firing him. She’d just fire these guys, one after the other. It was brutal. Some of them were great guys, but they didn’t stand a chance.” Once again, Dad was to blame. Marian had given up telling Michelle to stop measuring the men she dated against her father. “She wouldn’t listen,” Marian said. “She wanted the kind of marriage I had.”

So now it was up to Craig to step in. “Look, Miche,” Craig said, taking his sister aside after she “fired” yet another prospective mate. “You’re not going to find guys who are going to be perfect, because they didn’t have Dad as a father. So you’ve got to sort of come up with your own framework.”

“Nope,” Michelle replied matter-of-factly. “I’m not looking for Dad, but I’m not about to settle, either.”

“But, Miche…”

“Hey,” she shot back, holding up her hand to silence her brother, “it’s my life. You guys have got to stop worrying about me. The right guy is out there, and I’ll know him when I see him.”

Hers is the voice I hear inside my head when I make decisions.

—Barack

It takes a lot to push his buttons.

He has incredibly low blood pressure.

—Michelle