Her sigh was audible. “Girl, no,” she called back. She was amused, I could
tell. She knew how tardiness drove me nuts—how I saw it as nothing but hubris.
Barack Obama had already created a stir at the firm. For one thing, he’d just
finished his first year of law school, and normally we only hired second-year
students for summer positions. But rumor had it he was exceptional. Word had
spread that one of his professors at Harvard—the daughter of a managing partner
—claimed he was the most gifted law student she’d ever encountered. Some of
the secretaries who’d seen the guy come in for his interview were saying that on
top of this apparent brilliance he was also cute.
I was skeptical of all of it. In my experience, you put a suit on any half-
intelligent black man and white people tended to go bonkers. I was doubtful he’d
earned the hype. I’d checked out his photo in the summer edition of our staff
directory—a less-than-flattering, poorly lit head shot of a guy with a big smile
and a whiff of geekiness—and remained unmoved. His bio said he was originally
from Hawaii, which at least made him a comparatively exotic geek. Otherwise,
nothing stood out. The only surprise had come weeks earlier when I made a
quick obligatory phone call to introduce myself. I’d been pleasantly startled by the
voice on the other end of the line—a rich, even sexy, baritone that didn’t seem
to match his photo one bit.
It was another ten minutes before he checked in at the reception area on our
floor and I walked out to meet him, finding him seated on a couch—one Barack
Obama, dressed in a dark suit and still a little damp from the rain. He grinned
sheepishly and apologized for his lateness as he shook my hand. He had a wide
smile and was taller and thinner than I’d imagined he’d be—a man who was
clearly not much of an eater, who also looked fully unaccustomed to wearing
business clothes. If he knew he was arriving with a whiz-kid reputation, it didn’t
show. As I walked him through the corridors to my office, introducing him to
the cushy mundanities of corporate law—showing him the word-processing
center and the coffee machine, explaining our system for tracking billable hours
—he was quiet and deferential, listening attentively. After about twenty minutes,
I delivered him to the senior partner who’d be his actual supervisor for the
summer and went back to my desk.
Later that day, I took Barack to lunch at the fancy restaurant on the first
floor of our office building, a place packed with well-groomed bankers and
lawyers power lunching over meals priced like dinners. This was the boon of
having a summer associate to advise: It was an excuse to eat out and eat well, and