Ever since the scrutiny of the Reverend Jeremiah Wright had become an issue in
Barack’s first presidential campaign, ever since opponents had tried to use faith as
a weapon—suggesting that Barack was a “secret Muslim”—we’d made the choice
to exercise our faith privately and at home, including praying each night before
dinner and organizing a few sessions of Sunday school at the White House for
our daughters. We didn’t join a church in Washington, because we didn’t want
to subject another congregation to the kind of bad-faith attacks that had rained
down on Trinity, our church in Chicago. It was a sacrifice, though. I missed the
warmth of a spiritual community. Every night, I’d look over and see Barack lying
with his eyes closed on the other side of the bed, quietly saying his prayers.
Months after the birther rumors picked up steam, on a Friday night in
November, a man parked his car on a closed part of Constitution Avenue and
started firing a semiautomatic rifle out the window, aimed at the top floors of the
White House. A bullet hit one of the windows in the Yellow Oval Room,
where I sometimes liked to sit and have tea. Another lodged itself in a window
frame, and more ricocheted off the roof. Barack and I were out that night, as was
Malia, but Sasha and my mom were both at home, though unaware and
unharmed. It took weeks to replace the ballistic glass of the window in the
Yellow Oval, and I often found myself staring at the thick round crater that had
been left by the bullet, reminded of how vulnerable we were.
In general, I understood that it was better for all of us not to acknowledge
the hate or dwell on the risk, even when others felt compelled to bring it up.
Malia would eventually join the high school tennis team at Sidwell, which
practiced on the school courts on Wisconsin Avenue. She was there one day
when a woman, the mother of another student, approached her, gesturing at the
busy road running past the courts. “Aren’t you afraid out here?” she asked.
My daughter, as she grew, was learning to use her voice, discovering her
own ways to reinforce the boundaries she needed. “If you’re asking me whether I
ponder my death every day,” she said to the woman, as politely as she could, “the
answer is no.”
A couple of years later, that same mother would come up to me at a parent
event at school and pass me a heartfelt note of apology, saying that she’d
understood right away the error in what she’d done—having put worries on a
child who could do nothing about them. It meant a lot to me that she’d thought
so much about it. She’d heard, in Malia’s answer, both the resilience and the
vulnerability, an echo of all that we lived with and all we tried to keep at bay.