interesting, but for you it is not. Maybe during those three years you make
friends you’ll love and respect forever, people who seem genuinely called to the
bloodless intricacies of the law, but you yourself are not called. Your passion stays
low, yet under no circumstance will you underperform. You live, as you always
have, by the code of effort/result, and with it you keep achieving until you think
you know the answers to all the questions—including the most important one.
Am I good enough? Yes, in fact I am.
What happens next is that the rewards get real. You reach for the next rung
of the ladder, and this time it’s a job with a salary in the Chicago offices of a
high-end law firm called Sidley & Austin. You’re back where you started, in the
city where you were born, only now you go to work on the forty-seventh floor
in a downtown building with a wide plaza and a sculpture out front. You used to
pass by it as a South Side kid riding the bus to high school, peering mutely out
the window at the people who strode like titans to their jobs. Now you’re one of
them. You’ve worked yourself out of that bus and across the plaza and onto an
upward-moving elevator so silent it seems to glide. You’ve joined the tribe. At
the age of twenty-five, you have an assistant. You make more money than your
parents ever have. Your co-workers are polite, educated, and mostly white. You
wear an Armani suit and sign up for a subscription wine service. You make
monthly payments on your law school loans and go to step aerobics after work.
Because you can, you buy yourself a Saab.
Is there anything to question? It doesn’t seem that way. You’re a lawyer
now. You’ve taken everything ever given to you—the love of your parents, the
faith of your teachers, the music from Southside and Robbie, the meals from
Aunt Sis, the vocabulary words drilled into you by Dandy—and converted it to
this. You’ve climbed the mountain. And part of your job, aside from parsing
abstract intellectual property issues for big corporations, is to help cultivate the
next set of young lawyers being courted by the firm. A senior partner asks if
you’ll mentor an incoming summer associate, and the answer is easy: Of course
you will. You have yet to understand the altering force of a simple yes. You
don’t know that when a memo arrives to confirm the assignment, some deep and
unseen fault line in your life has begun to tremble, that some hold is already
starting to slip. Next to your name is another name, that of some hotshot law
student who’s busy climbing his own ladder. Like you, he’s black and from
Harvard. Other than that, you know nothing—just the name, and it’s an odd
one.