I

opportunity to speak with a woman whose background mirrored mine but who
was a few years ahead of me in her career trajectory. Valerie was calm, bold, and
wise in ways that few people I’d met before were. She was someone to learn
from, to stick close to. I saw this right away.

Before I left, she offered me a job, inviting me to join her staff as an assistant
to Mayor Daley, beginning as soon as I was ready. I would no longer be
practicing law. My salary would be $60,000, about half of what I was currently
making at Sidley & Austin. She told me I should take some time and think about
whether I was truly prepared to make this sort of change. It was my leap to
consider, my leap to make.

I had never been one to hold city hall in high regard. Having grown up
black and on the South Side, I had little faith in politics. Politics had traditionally
been used against black folks, as a means to keep us isolated and excluded, leaving
us undereducated, unemployed, and underpaid. I had grandparents who’d lived
through the horror of Jim Crow laws and the humiliation of housing
discrimination and basically mistrusted authority of any sort. (Southside, as you
may recall, thought that even the dentist was out to get him.) My father, who
was a city employee most of his life, had essentially been conscripted into service
as a Democratic precinct captain in order to even be considered for promotions at
his job. He relished the social aspect of his precinct duties but had always been
put off by city hall cronyism.

And yet I was suddenly considering a city hall job. I’d winced at the pay cut,
but on some visceral level I was just intrigued. I was feeling another twinge, a
quiet nudge toward what might be a whole different future from the one I’d
planned for. I was almost ready to leap, but for one thing. It wasn’t just about me
anymore. When Valerie called me a few days later to follow up, I told her I was
still thinking the offer over. I then asked a final and probably strange question.
“Could I please,” I said, “also introduce you to my fiancé?”

suppose I should back up here, rewinding us through the heavy heat of that
summer, through the disorienting haze of those long months after my father died.
Barack had flown back to Chicago to be with me for as long as he could around
my dad’s funeral before returning to finish at Harvard. After graduation in late
May, he packed up his things, sold his banana-yellow Datsun, and flew back to
Chicago, delivering himself to 7436 South Euclid Avenue and into my arms. I