The Rebellion of Gooey Cheese
I had gleefully bought my ticket and packed my bags only sentences into the preface of Michelle Obama’s Becoming. I wanted to ride in the sidecar of Michelle’s motorcycle, whatever twists and turns lay ahead.
She was describing a night, not long after they moved out of the White House, as they settled into their new life. Alone with her dogs, Beau and Sunny, Michelle enjoyed a glorious moment of moseying into the kitchen to make herself toast. Relishing this small luxury, after having a chef prepare her every meal for the last eight years, she rebelliously changes her mind and microwaves an unrefined, gooey cheese sandwich. She ate it outside (another forgotten luxury), barefoot. I’m there with her, breathing in the calm, evening air, feeling the grass on my feet. It feels like a moment of triumph. This simple act morphs into a quiet victory dance.
Despite all the fanfare, adoration, and the compulsion of people everywhere to place her upon an unrealistic pedestal, Michelle’s story is compelling for a multitude of reasons. Her distinction in American history as the first African-American first lady aside, what makes her infinitely compelling to this reader, is that she is a genuinely likable, down-to-earth person outside of her famous persona. Nothing endeared me to her more (other than her wearing sparkly knee-high boots to a recent interview!) than her honest, off-the-cuff remark in a discussion with poet Elizabeth Alexander about Sheryl Sandberg’s ‘lean in’ maxim, “That shit doesn’t always work!” A—men! In my humble opinion, Mrs. Sandberg can take her advice and shove it up her silver-spun arse. To my fellow white women, particularly the ones with enough money to throw at the daily “inconveniences” that keep one from their “best life,” I implore you to stop telling other women what’s possible. No really, just, stop! But, I digress…
I enjoyed the entire trip through Michelle’s life, which winds from her childhood and early adulthood to meeting Barack and building their careers, their relationship, and eventually, their family, and finally, through their years at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. I adored reading about young Michelle Robinson. In “Becoming Me,” her origin story is overflowing with burgeoning self-awareness about overachieving layered with society's sometimes-warring expectations and limitations for people of color and for women. Michelle reminisces about the soundtrack of her early life as the "sounds of striving,” brought to life by the sometimes inharmonious-yet-hard-fought musical handiwork of students learning piano from her stern aunt in the apartment below. Michelle pushed herself hard, sometimes down paths that earned her accolades from others but didn’t resonate with her growing need to seek meaning and have a sense of purpose. In a sentence that pierced straight through my over-achieving heart, Michelle ruminates about her endless box-checking,
“Such is the life of a girl who can’t stop wondering, Am I good enough? and is still trying to show herself the answer.”
My favorite theme throughout her book is that she implores the reader to be curious and compassionate about what she calls people’s “unseen histories.” These are the stories that give us context about how people come to be. Michelle poignantly recounts stories of her father, grandfathers, great-grandfathers, and uncles - generations of able-bodied, hard-working Black men left out of the American dream because of their inability to get a union card. Membership was, of course, reserved for white men. Without this card, they were unable to secure lucrative blue-collar work, and this left them despondent, angry, and poor. In another affecting story, she talks about growing up near Hyde Park and the University of Chicago. The renowned university, with its soaring, ivy walls and Gothic towers felt a world away from the place she inhabited, years before she would work there as an adult. In a metaphor that wasn’t lost on young Michelle, the University seemed to turn its back away from the community on whose soil it sat. Here was a building that many in her community could physically touch as they walked by it every day, yet, it did not invite them in with open arms. Her story intersects with Chicago’s, but while her life was expanding and filling with color and context, Chicago was shrinking for some, as the city erected barriers and created division. Filled with perspectives different than our own, these unseen histories deserve a platform out in the open. They also deserve our wide-open open ears and hearts, eager to empathize. We can’t talk about equality, and have honest conversations about race in America, without acknowledging the systemic lack of generational equity. To even get to the place where we can have these conversations, we must learn to listen open-heartedly to peoples’ unfiltered experiences.
A story that I couldn’t stop thinking about was one where Michelle felt the weight of her race through her parents’ eyes. Michelle’s closest neighborhood friends had bought a house in the Chicago suburbs, so The Robinsons took a drive out one Sunday for a visit and to see their new home. Parkway Gardens, Michelle’s neighborhood, was a historically diverse middle-class enclave on the south side of Chicago. In the 60s it was a mosaic of families of all colors. By the mid-seventies, it was primarily black. Non-black families were fleeing the city in droves and buying up slices of the American dream in places like Park Forest, a planned community of cookie-cutter houses, where Michelle’s friends lived. The Robinsons didn’t purchase a home for myriad reasons. Her parents didn’t like the suburbs, and not for the reasons you’d suspect. The 'burbs seemed to them bland, too far away, and lacking in trees. After a fun day with friends in Park Forest, their curiosity sufficiently sated, the family went to retrieve their car and drive home. On the driver’s side of Michelle’s father’s beloved Buick was a two-foot-long scratch made with a key or rock. Her father didn’t say anything about it on the ride home, but she felt his sadness and the weight of that laceration. Michelle suspected that the Robinsons were simply too dark-skinned for Park Forest. The family they visited was black, too, but very light-skinned. So light, in fact, that she suspected her friend's new neighbors weren’t aware of their blackness. Until the much-darker Robinsons came to visit.
I couldn’t stop turning this story over and over in my mind. In a bit of wishful thinking, I imagined a present version of the person who keyed the Robinson’s car. I imagined a scenario where this person read Michelle's memoir, because, the current version of themselves respects and appreciates her as I do. I imagine this person flushing with hot shame realizing that they were the perpetrator of this anonymous, childhood transgression. That, of the objects of their disdain on that Sunday—objects, not other humans, certainly—one would become the first lady of the United States. I know this story is likely not true, but I remain hopeful that it could be a story that breeds atonement and understanding. This, over the more likely scenario, that the person who keyed their car probably won’t read Michelle’s book at all.
We all have yet-to-be-told histories, those parts of our story that are fundamental to who we are and why we have come to occupy the space we now find ourselves, coloring how we perceive and relate to the world around us. The more curious we are and open to receiving people’s stories, the better equipped we are to connect with their humanity.
“Becoming Us” is full of wisdom about what it means to have children and a career, and also be married to a partner who has a calling. She is honest about her struggles, and about finding genuine meaning in her work. The palpable, down-to-earth relatability of her experience is disarming. In “Becoming More", the last act of the book about their time in the White House, it sometimes feels as if she had been launched into an alien world and is reporting back to Earth what she finds. That a family this functional lived the highly-orchestrated and often suffocating life as the first family, gave me hope. It happened once, and it can happen again.
But I found myself drawn, not to her steely presence in what is simultaneously the most celebrated and challenging role in American life, but to her young seeking, searching self. Michelle’s story is one of a woman genuinely trying to navigate her way through life. It was a trip through the mind of a thoughtful, engaging, woman with whom I could be friends. And what a journey it has been so far. I am looking forward to what’s next in her personal evolution.
