visibly, pew to pew, inside the church. I held tightly to Craig’s elbow as he
walked me down the aisle. As we reached the front, I caught my mother’s gaze.
She was sitting in the first row, looking regal in a floor-length black-and-white
sequined dress we’d picked out together, her chin lifted and her eyes proud. We
still ached for my father every day, though as he would’ve wanted, we were also
continuing on.
Barack had woken up that morning with a nasty head cold, but it had
miraculously cleared as soon as he arrived at the church. He was now smiling at
me, bright-eyed, from his place at the altar, dressed in a rented tux and a buffed
pair of new shoes. Marriage was still more mysterious to him than it was to me,
but in the fourteen months we’d been engaged, he’d been nothing but all in.
We’d chosen everything about this day carefully. Barack, having initially declared
he was not interested in wedding minutiae, had ended up lovingly, assertively—
and predictably—inserting his opinion into everything from the flower
arrangements to the canapés that would get served at the South Shore Cultural
Center in another hour or so. We’d picked our wedding song, which Santita
would sing with her stunning voice, accompanied by a pianist.
It was a Stevie Wonder tune called “You and I (We Can Conquer the
World).” I’d first heard it as a kid, in third or fourth grade, when Southside gave
me the Talking Book album as a gift—my first record album, utterly precious to
me. I kept it at his house and was allowed to play it anytime I came to visit. He’d
taught me how to care for the vinyl, how to wipe the record’s grooves clean of
dust, how to lift the needle from the turntable and set it down delicately in the
right spot. Usually he’d left me alone with the music, making himself scarce so
that I could learn, in privacy, everything that album had to teach, mostly by
belting out the lyrics again and again with my little-girl lungs. Well, in my mind,
we can conquer the world / In love you and I, you and I, you and I...
I was nine years old at the time. I knew nothing about love and
commitment or conquering the world. All I could do was conjure for myself
shimmery ideas about what love might be like and who might come along
someday to make me feel that strong. Would it be Michael Jackson? José
Cardenal from the Cubs? Someone like my dad? I couldn’t even begin to imagine
him, really, the person who would become the “you” to my “I.”
But now here we were.
Trinity Church had a dynamic and soulful reputation. Barack had first
started going there during his days as an organizer, and more recently the two of