working there. When it came time for me and Craig to think about college, we
didn’t even consider applying to the University of Chicago. Princeton, for some
strange reason, had struck us as more accessible.
Hearing all this, Art was incredulous. “You’ve really never been here?” he
said. “Never?”
“Nope, not once.”
There was an odd power in saying it out loud. I hadn’t given the idea much
thought before now, but it occurred to me that I’d have made a perfectly fine
University of Chicago student, if only the town-gown divide hadn’t been so vast
—if I’d known about the school and the school had known about me. Thinking
about this, I felt an internal prick, a small subterranean twinge of purpose. The
combination of where I came from and what I’d made of myself gave me a
certain, possibly meaningful perspective. Being black and from the South Side, I
suddenly saw, helped me recognize problems that a man like Art Sussman didn’t
even realize existed.
In several years, I’d get my chance to work for the university and reckon
with some of these community-relations problems directly, but right now Art
was just kindly offering to pass around my résumé.
“I think you should talk to Susan Sher,” he told me then, unwittingly
setting off what to this day feels like an inspired chain reaction. Susan was about
fifteen years older than I was. She’d been a partner at a big law firm but had
ultimately bailed out of the corporate world, just as I was hoping to do, though
she was still practicing law with the Chicago city government. Susan had slate-
gray eyes, the kind of fair skin that belongs on a Victorian queen, and a laugh that
often ended with a mischievous snort. She was gently confident and highly
accomplished and would become a lifelong friend. “I’d hire you right now,” she
told me when we finally met. “But you just finished telling me how you don’t
want to be a lawyer.”
Instead, Susan proposed what now seems like another fated introduction,
steering me and my résumé toward a new colleague of hers at city hall—another
ship-jumping corporate lawyer with a yen for public service, this one a fellow
daughter of the South Side and someone who would end up altering my course
in life, not once, but repeatedly. “The person you really need to meet,” Susan
said, “is Valerie Jarrett.”
Valerie Jarrett was the newly appointed deputy chief of staff to the mayor of
Chicago and had deep connections across the city’s African American