“It makes me think, ‘Okay, something has changed here,’ ” Brown said, driving along on a sunny afternoon.
And that change had introduced a nagging worry in the back of her mind, one that she was struggling to understand.
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The Best Buy manager finally called late that night. Would Mathur be able to work on Good Friday? “Yes,” he said. And with that he had his first official job as a college graduate, as a member of the Geek Squad at a store in Skokie, Ill., working 20 hours a week.
“I feel like this is a win for us,” Coleman told him. “In this economy? That’s a win. Even at Best Buy.”
“It’s just a job,” he said. He had applied for several hundred others — in computer programming, design and software development — before settling for this one.
“You could have been too prideful,” Coleman said. “You could have decided it was beneath you, but you didn’t. That says a lot.”
“Just a job,” he said again.
“I’m proud of you,” she said, reaching for his hand.
“I don’t want to talk about it, okay?”
“I’m sorry,” she said.
Much of their year together had been spent boosting each other’s self-confidence and explaining away each other’s disappointments in hourly text messages and nightly talks on Skype. Their mounting debts? “Everybody is poor in America now,” Coleman said. Their chronic underemployment? “This is life in the Bush-Clinton-Obama economy,” Mathur said.
To create something to look forward to, they had started planning their lives together in e-mails they sent back and forth. He would start a business and make most of the money. She would travel the world to take photos. They would marry in a ceremony that honored his Hindu heritage and raise their kids the same way they had been raised — solidly middle-class, living in the Midwest. That was the American life they wanted, and the American life that felt increasingly like “a fantasy,” Coleman said.
She had encouraged Mathur to take an unpaid position as a designer for an Internet start-up company, on the promise that he would be paid later. He had encouraged her to spend $4,500 on a camera with two lenses, which she had taken out a loan to buy. “A smart investment,” he called it, but she wasn’t so sure. Was it really smart to take on more debt in this economy? Was it smart to invest in herself?
“Am I just wasting my time and money being here?” she asked. “I feel stuck. I used to feel so sure about everything.”
“You made the right choice,” he said.
“Do I even have the personality to succeed?” she asked.
“Of course,” he said.
“I don’t have endless supplies of motivation anymore,” she said. “I need a win every once in a while to maintain. I can’t just keep taking hits.”
She had been taking them for four years, each blow chipping away at the hopefulness of Grant Park, until sometimes it seemed to her that only the photos remained.
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This was Chinyere Brown’s nagging worry: that the upward trajectory of her own life as a successful African American woman was occurring in a society that in some ways resented it.
In the apartment with the vaulted ceilings, she reached for a scrapbook on a shelf. She flipped to the famous Chicago Sun-Times cover from Nov. 5, 2008, the one with Obama’s face and the words “Mr. President” underneath. Then she flipped to another photo, this one of her — not the one with Kelly Coleman but one of her alone, holding the flag on election night, a photo that had run with stories in at least two newspapers.
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