Laid out on the end tables were the same sorts of white crocheted doilies that my
grandmother Shields used to have at her house. I spotted porcelain figurines that
looked just like the ones Robbie had kept on her shelves downstairs from us on
Euclid Avenue. A man in the front row was smiling at me warmly. I was in Iowa,
but I had the distinct feeling of being at home. Iowans, I was realizing, were like
Shieldses and Robinsons. They didn’t suffer fools. They didn’t trust people who
put on airs. They could sniff out a phony a mile away.
My job, I realized, was to be myself, to speak as myself. And so I did.“Let me tell you about me. I’m Michelle Obama, raised on the South Side
of Chicago, in a little apartment on the top floor of a two-story house that
felt a lot like this one. My dad was a water-pump operator for the city. My
mom stayed at home to raise my brother and me.”I talked about everything—about my brother and the values we were raised
with, about this hotshot lawyer I met at work, the guy who’d stolen my heart
with his groundedness and his vision for the world, the man who’d left his socks
lying around the house that morning and sometimes snored in his sleep. I told
them about how I was keeping my job at the hospital, about how my mother was
picking our girls up from school that day.
I didn’t sugarcoat my feelings about politics. The political world was no
place for good people, I said, explaining how I’d been conflicted about whether
Barack should run at all, worried about what the spotlight might do to our
family. But I was standing before them because I believed in my husband and
what he could do. I knew how much he read and how deeply he thought about
things. I said that he was exactly the kind of smart, decent president I would
choose for this country, even if selfishly I’d have rather kept him closer to home
all these years.
As weeks went by, I’d tell the same story—in Davenport, Cedar Rapids,
Council Bluffs; in Sioux City, Marshalltown, Muscatine—in bookstores, union
halls, a home for aging military veterans, and, as the weather warmed up, on front
porches and in public parks. The more I told my story, the more my voice settled
into itself. I liked my story. I was comfortable telling it. And I was telling it to
people who despite the difference in skin color reminded me of my family—
postal workers who had bigger dreams just as Dandy once had; civic-minded
piano teachers like Robbie; stay-at-home moms who were active in the PTA like