I

think I’m going to go into politics.”

Instead, Hadiya Pendleton became one of three people who died in separate
incidents of gun violence in Chicago on that one January day. She was the thirty-
sixth person in Chicago killed in gun violence that year, and the year was at that
point just twenty-nine days old. It goes without saying that nearly all those
victims were black. For all her hopes and hard work, Hadiya became a symbol of
the wrong thing.

Her funeral was filled with people, another broken community jammed into
a church, this one working to handle the sight of a teenage girl in a casket lined
with purple silk. Cleopatra stood up and spoke about her daughter. Hadiya’s
friends stood up and told stories about her, each one punctuated by a larger
feeling of outrage and helplessness. These were children, asking not just why but
why so often? There were powerful adults in the room that day—not only me, but
the mayor of the city, the governor of the state, Jesse Jackson Sr., and Valerie
Jarrett, among others—all of us packed into pews, left to reckon privately with
our grief and guilt as the choir sang with such force that it shook the floor of the
church.

t was important to me to be more than a consoler. In my life, I’d heard plenty
of empty words coming from important people, lip service paid during times of
crisis with no action to follow. I was determined to be someone who told the
truth, using my voice to lift up the voiceless when I could, and to not disappear
on people in need. I understood that when I showed up somewhere, it appeared
dramatic from the outside—a sudden and swift-descending storm kicked up by
the motorcade, the agents, the aides, and the media, with me at the center. We
were there and then gone. I didn’t like what this did to my interactions, the way
my presence sometimes caused people to stammer or go silent, unsure of how to
be themselves. It’s why I often tried to introduce myself with a hug, to slow
down the moment and shuck some of the pretense, landing us all in the flesh.

I tried to build relationships with the people I met, especially those who
didn’t normally have access to the world I now inhabited. I wanted to share the
brightness as I could. I invited Hadiya Pendleton’s parents to sit next to me at
Barack’s State of the Union speech a few days after the funeral and then hosted
the family at the White House for the Easter Egg Roll. Cleopatra, who became a
vocal advocate for violence prevention, also returned a couple of times to attend