Becoming

I 11 t hurts to live after someone has died. It just does. It can hurt to walk down a hallway or o ...

L We started quiet, but soon exploded, as the kindly funeral director pretended not to listen and ...

Still unsure of where I hoped to land, I typed up letters of introduction and sent them to people ...

working there. When it came time for me and Craig to think about college, we didn’t even consider a ...

community. Like Susan, she’d been smart enough to land herself a job in a blue- chip firm after la ...

anything. She described to me how her transition from corporate law into government felt like ...

I opportunity to speak with a woman whose background mirrored mine but who was a few years ahead of me ...

loved him. I felt loved by him. We’d made it almost two years as a long-distance couple, and now, ...

A In a nutshell, Barack believed and trusted when others did not. He had a simple, buoying fai ...

Illinois bar exam three years earlier, the summer after finishing up at Harvard, submitting myself be ...

over test, going on to pass it handily. In the end, aside from issues of pride, my screwup would m ...

I that?” From here, we traversed all the familiar loops of the old argument. Did marriage m ...

T her the same kind of clear-eyed perspective I saw in Barack. Barack had concerns about my working at city h ...

out of Chicago on a Wednesday in late August, had a long wait in the airport in Frankfurt, Germany, and t ...

tottering, informal jitney-like buses that could be seen everywhere, painted brightly with murals ...

everything installed in us by our parents and their parents before them. Over time, we have figur ...

I laughed and explained, with Auma’s help, that I was black through and through, basically ...

B 12 arack and I got married on a sunny October Saturday in 1992, the two of us standing before more tha ...

visibly, pew to pew, inside the church. I held tightly to Craig’s elbow as he walked me ...

O us had formally become members, following the lead of many of our young, professional Afric ...