together in the otherwise crowded room. She was wearing a pair of pristine
white gloves and appeared just as fresh as she’d been hours earlier when we first
met. She smiled up at me.
“You’re so tall,” she remarked, cocking her head.
“Well,” I said, chuckling, “the shoes give me a couple of inches. But yes,
I’m tall.”
The Queen then glanced down at the pair of black Jimmy Choos I was
wearing. She shook her head.
“These shoes are unpleasant, are they not?” she said. She gestured with some
frustration at her own black pumps.
I confessed then to the Queen that my feet were hurting. She confessed that
hers hurt, too. We looked at each other then with identical expressions, like,
When is all this standing around with world leaders going to finally wrap up? And with
this, she busted out with a fully charming laugh.
Forget that she sometimes wore a diamond crown and that I’d flown to
London on the presidential jet; we were just two tired ladies oppressed by our
shoes. I then did what’s instinctive to me anytime I feel connected to a new
person, which is to express my feelings outwardly. I laid a hand affectionately
across her shoulder.
I couldn’t have known it in the moment, but I was committing what would
be deemed an epic faux pas. I’d touched the Queen of England, which I’d soon
learn was apparently not done. Our interaction at the reception was caught on
camera, and in the coming days it would be reproduced in media reports all over
the world: “A Breach in Protocol!” “Michelle Obama Dares to Hug the Queen!”
It revived some of the campaign-era speculation that I was generally uncouth and
lacking the standard elegance of a First Lady, and worried me somewhat, too,
thinking I’d possibly distracted from Barack’s efforts abroad. But I tried not to let
the criticism rattle me. If I hadn’t done the proper thing at Buckingham Palace, I
had at least done the human thing. I daresay that the Queen was okay with it,
too, because when I touched her, she only pulled closer, resting a gloved hand
lightly on the small of my back.
The following day, while Barack went off for a marathon session of
meetings on the economy, I went to visit a school for girls. It was a government-
funded, inner-city secondary school in the Islington neighborhood, not far from a
set of council estates, which is what public-housing projects are called in England.
More than 90 percent of the school’s nine hundred students were black or from