Your story reads almost like a myth. Your great-great-grandfather Jim Robinson, the first documented member of your family tree, was born on Friendfield Plantation in Georgetown, South Carolina, which is over 450 miles away from the White House. Slaves lived in tiny whitewashed slacks that lined the dirt road en route to this rice plantation, and it was there that Jim, after emancipation, worked as a sharecropper, toiling in the rice fields along the Sampit River, and lived with his wife, Louiser, and their children. We don’t know how Jim died, but local historians believe that his body is located in an unmarked grave that commands a view of old rice fields on the outer limits of White Creek.1 Robinson, his wife, and his children comprised the last illiterate branch; each descending branch of the family was more educated than its predecessor.
Born on the South Side of Chicago, you showed your intellect quite early on, skipping second grade before entering a gifted program in sixth grade. After graduating as salutatorian from your magnet high school, you went on to Princeton University, a place where your teachers told you that you would never be accepted. I know what that’s like, too. My white female guidance counselor suggested that I go to community college when I was in the top 5 percent of my class and assumed that my parents weren’t wealthy enough to afford a place like Princeton. When you read your acceptance letter, did you grip the edges of the paper out of fear that it would disappear? Did you cry?
When you were making your way to campus, were you afraid? Back in 1981, Princeton was considered the most conservative of the Ivies; it still is. But I know, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that your experiences with racism were more overt. Your classmates asked to touch your hair like you were an object that could be crushed down to the small size they needed you to be in order to make themselves feel great. When the mother of your freshman roommate, Catherine Donnelly, discovered that you were black, she called her alumni friends to object, even going so far as to visit the student housing office to get Catherine’s room changed. Her grandmother begged Catherine’s mother to take her out of school entirely. Catherine Donnelly’s grandmother wanted Catherine out of the school immediately and to be brought home. How did you feel then? Did you ever walk down Prospect Avenue—“The Street,” as we call it—and marvel at the eating clubs, some of them eerily similar to plantation houses? If you dared to walk down The Street, were you afraid that some drunk white jock or the son of some finance tycoon or a scion of some political dynasty would yell “nigger” as you passed or throw things at you? Where did you find your place of refuge during your four years there, and how can many other black women, who are still fighting for recognition and respect, find theirs?
You do not know the impact that you had on the black female student body during my time at Princeton, even while we waited with bated breath for you to return to campus, to no avail. It felt cruel that you would not at least stop by and talk to us. But our complaints tapered off when we more deeply considered just how much unnecessary affliction you endured as an undergraduate. This story of your suffering at Princeton is yours and yours alone, but if we could have known more of it, perhaps we would have felt less alone. Still, we forgot that you aren’t just our First Lady, but the whole country’s, and that perhaps you simply didn’t have the time. We wanted a piece of you to ourselves because whether or not we could articulate it then, we know now that some of the ways in which we see are only possible because of our shared identity as black women. We wanted to hold on to that preciousness for dear life.
I entered Princeton in 2010, exactly twenty-five years after you graduated, and your ascendance sparked an almost cult-like following among black female students; you provided hope as we obsessed over black male desire. We outnumbered the black men three to one; it was a sort of bloodbath. Statistics told us that our professional success would imperil our chances of ever getting married, and we were quite aware how much the odds were against us at Princeton. There were very few black women who were successful in finding relationships. The perpetually single ones like me overanalyzed this incessantly rather than chalking it up to luck, God’s favor, or anything in between.
Tell me, did you have these same anxieties while you were at Princeton? Did you date anyone and worry that your dreams alongside the simple fact of you being a black woman made you an unsuitable partner for anyone, black or not? Did you question your worth?
At least, during my time there, my classmates and I were fortunate to have you, an example of a black woman who excelled and fell in love with someone who did nothing to diminish her. Your story was referenced so many times that your importance became biblical, deserving of a book or chapter of its own somewhere after the book of Ruth and before Proverbs 31. You were never “easy.” At Harvard Law, you dated Stanley Stocker-Edwards, the son of Patti LaBelle, and you later said, “My family swore I would never find a man that would put up with me,” as though you were a nuisance rather than a blessing standing beside a lover. What was it about your personality that anyone would have to put with? What does it say about your family that they thought that the life you sought to live would be met with a scoff from a man? In those moments, did those comments bounce off you like Teflon or stick like molasses?
In the introduction of your senior thesis, “Princeton-Educated Blacks and the Black Community,” you wrote, “My experiences at Princeton have made me far more aware of my ‘Blackness’ than ever before. I have found that at Princeton no matter how liberal and open-minded some of my White professors and classmates try to be toward me, I sometimes feel like a visitor on campus; as if I really don’t belong . . . These experiences have made it apparent to me that the path I have chosen to follow by attending Princeton will likely lead to my further integration and/or assimilation into a White cultural and social structure that will only allow me to remain on the periphery of society; never becoming a full participant.” This might have been the case when you were at Princeton and later at Sidley & Austin, but what about as our nation’s First Lady? What happens to white people’s eyes when you eschew the periphery, when you become the most visible woman in the world? When they turn on the television, they see you meeting with heads of state from all over the world. When they flip through magazines, there you are smiling and wearing the finest of fabrics created by designers who seek to put the best of their wares on your statuesque black figure. When they close their eyes and think about this country’s direction, blackness is carved and curved into two figures: you and Barack. That is inescapable. It is the kind of upheaval that black people have patiently waited for white people to experience, even if your eight years in front of us are not enough to overturn centuries of oppression. But I pray that they at least briefly knew what it meant to feel like the “other” whenever they saw your smile and the elegance of your stride and that it scared them. Damn, those eight years felt good.