Becoming

Our hopes were pinned on Iowa. We had to win it or otherwise stand down. Mostly rural and more ...

O intensity and pace. Just a few years younger than I was, Melissa also felt more like a peer ...

Laid out on the end tables were the same sorts of white crocheted doilies that my grandmother Shields used ...

I my mother; blue-collar workers who’d do anything for their families, just like my dad. I didn’t need ...

was made up mostly of working-class African Americans. The news landed like a rock through a stained-glass ...

W shadow—but the girls took to his corny jokes as quickly as they took to his cooking. He showe ...

to an anthropology student volunteering for the campaign in Iowa or from the quiet corner of a ...

who had not bothered to get to know me but was now trying to shape my story in a cynical way. I tried not t ...

questionable food at otherwise charming roadside diners, I learned to value the bland certainty ...

it was looking like we might not be able to win there. For the better part of a year now, Barack and h ...

A galvanized and united. They were connecting voters more directly to their democracy, whether through the ...

United States of America.” The auditorium thundered. I watched from the floor with huge pride. “America, our ...

I laughed. I’d been worried about how the girls would handle their first Christmas break a ...

where the primary was less than a week away. Iowa had changed us all. Iowa had given me, ...

This is my family, sometime around 1965, dressed up for a celebration. Note my brother Craig’s protective ...

We grew up living in the apartment above my great-aunt Robbie Shields, pictured here holding me. During ...

My father, Fraser Robinson, worked for more than twenty years for the city of Chicago, tending boilers at ...

My dad’s Buick Electra 225—the Deuce and a Quarter, we called it—was his pride and joy and the source of many ...

When I began kindergarten in 1969, my neighborhood on the South Side of Chicago was made up of a rac ...

Here I am at Princeton. ...