Her Heart's in the Race

The year was 1990 and Michelle Robinson was toiling at the top-tier Chicago law firm of Sidley Austin, tracing a worthy and entirely conventional path for a talented graduate of Princeton University and Harvard Law School. The job helped repay her student loans but spoke little to her soul. When she broke away, first to the staff of Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley, then to a series of community service jobs, she began to merge her ambitions with a determination to make a difference.

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Her new course also dovetailed with the personal ethic of one Barack Obama. After his own tour of Harvard, where he was elected president of the law review, he shunned the corporate ladder, choosing a small public interest firm headed by a Daley antagonist and former lawyer for Harold Washington, Chicago's first and only black mayor. Barack Obama taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago, wrote a memoir called "Dreams From My Father," and by 1997 was a new face in a crowd of state senators commuting to Springfield.

"Barack and I had both struggled with the question: When you know you've been blessed and know you have a set of gifts, how do you maximize those gifts so you're impacting the greatest number of people?" Michelle Obama says. "And what do you do? Is it community organizing? Is it politics? Is it as a parent? Our answer at some level is it can be all of that."

South Side Childhood

It is not a shy person who sets a bar high, then chooses to lay out her reasoning to audiences and interviewers all across the country, day after day, without notes or evident anxiety. Chicago businesswoman Kevann Cooke, a fellow black Princeton graduate, describes Michelle as "intelligent, thoughtful and a hell of an amazing public speaker. She has the ability to talk to anyone, and that's because she's comfortable in her own skin."

Maybe it was always that way for a woman who jokes that her family wondered what man would be strong enough to win her heart and handle her personality.

For much of her early life, Obama lived on the second floor of a two-family house in South Shore, a predominantly black working-class community near Lake Michigan on Chicago's South Side. Her brother, Craig, says, "If I had to describe it to a real estate agent, it would be 1BR, 1BA. . . . If you said it was 1,100 square feet, I'd call you a liar."

Wood paneling divided the living room into three spaces -- one for Craig's bedroom, one for Michelle's and one for a common study area. For a living, Frasier Robinson tended steam boilers and Marian Robinson stayed home until Michelle was in high school, and achievement was expected, fueled by a certain optimism.

"When you grow up as a black kid in a white world, so many times people are telling you, sometimes not maliciously, sometimes maliciously, you're not good enough," says Craig Robinson, a two-time Ivy League basketball player of the year at Princeton, now head coach at Brown University. "To have a family, which we did, who constantly reminded you how smart you were, how good you were, how pleasant it was to be around you, how successful you could be, it's hard to combat. Our parents gave us a little head start by making us feel confident.

"It sounds so corny," he adds, apologetically, "but that's how we grew up."

Barack Obama says visiting the Robinsons was "like dropping in on the set of 'Leave It to Beaver.' " As the son of a white single mother from Kansas and a largely absent black father from Kenya, he felt he had "bloodlines scattered to the four winds." But he found a sense of place at the Robinsons, where "there were uncles and aunts and cousins everywhere, stopping by to sit around the kitchen table and eat until they burst and tell wild stories and listen to Grandpa's old jazz collection and laugh deep into the night."

The portrait came with a twist: Beset by multiple sclerosis, Frasier Robinson declined from an agile boxer to a man who needed two canes to walk across the street. Craig Robinson says the children never knew their father without a limp, yet saw him report to work uncomplainingly. To the end, he was his family's voice of good sense and authority.

"I remember him saying you don't want to do things because you're worried about people thinking they're right; you want to do the right things," Craig says. "You grow up not worrying about what people think about you."