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arack and I got married on a sunny October Saturday in 1992, the two of us
standing before more than three hundred of our friends and family at Trinity
United Church of Christ on the South Side. It was a big wedding, and big was
how it needed to be. If we were having the wedding in Chicago, there was no
trimming the guest list. My roots went too deep. I had not just cousins but also
cousins of cousins, and those cousins of cousins had kids, none of whom I’d ever
leave out and all of whom made the day more meaningful and merry.

My father’s younger siblings were there. My mother’s family turned out in
its entirety. I had old school friends and neighbors who came, people from
Princeton, people from Whitney Young. Mrs. Smith, the wife of my high school
assistant principal who still lived down the street from us on Euclid Avenue,
helped organize the wedding, while our across-the-street neighbors Mr. and Mrs.
Thompson and their jazz band played later that day at our reception. Santita
Jackson, ebullient in a black dress with a plunging neckline, was my maid of
honor. I’d invited old colleagues from Sidley and new colleagues from city hall.
The law partners from Barack’s firm were there, as were his old organizer friends.
Barack’s rowdy Hawaiian high school guy posse mingled happily with a handful
of his Kenyan relatives, who wore brightly colored East African hats. Sadly, we’d
lost Gramps—Barack’s grandfather—the previous winter to cancer, but his
mother and grandmother had made the trip to Chicago, as had Auma and Maya,
half sisters from different continents, united in their affection for Barack. It was
the first time our two families had met, and the feeling was joyful.

We were surrounded by love—the eclectic, multicultural Obama kind and
the anchoring Robinsons-from-the-South-Side kind, all of it now interwoven