Her Heart's in the Race

Except maybe your father.

"If you disappointed my dad," Craig recalls, "everybody was, like, crying."

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"I am constantly trying to make sure that I am making him proud -- what would my father think of the choices that I've made, how I've lived my life, what careers I chose, what man I married," Michelle tells an audience. "That's the voice in my head that keeps me whole and keeps me grounded and keeps me the girl from the South Side of Chicago, no matter how many cameras are in the room, how many autographs people want, how big we get."

When Michelle and Barack went on their first date, they saw Spike Lee's "Do the Right Thing."

Ivy League Acclimation

Princeton left Michelle Robinson freshly conflicted about her own ambitions. The picture-book university, with its neo-Gothic quadrangles of carved stone and its clutches of self-assured white people, was an elite realm that delivered an elite education. It was a combination that cut both ways, reminding her too often that she was a black student from the urban working class, while also telling her that Michelle LaVaughn Robinson could play in the big leagues.

"My experiences at Princeton have made me far more aware of my 'Blackness' than ever before," she wrote in the introduction to her sociology thesis, "Princeton-Educated Blacks and the Black Community." "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 didn't belong."

Yet she began to think her time at the university had instilled "certain conservative values." By senior year, she saw herself "striving for many of the same goals as my White classmates -- acceptance to a prestigious graduate or professional school or a high-paying position in a successful corporation."

Her internal debate over her future -- What is possible for a black person? What is desirable? What is acceptable when judged by whom? -- continued at Harvard and Sidley Austin the year her father and college friend died. In her mid-20s, two years out of law school, her answers prompted her departure.

When she began looking for life beyond the law firm, she sought advice widely. A friend sent her résumé to Valerie Jarrett, Daley's deputy chief of staff, who interviewed her and offered a job on the spot. Michelle was intrigued, but she asked Jarrett to meet with her fiance. Barack wanted to know whether her ideas would find a home with Daley, the energetic but untested son of Chicago's imperious longtime Democratic boss.

At dinner with the couple, Jarrett came up with the right responses and Michelle went to City Hall in 1991, soon following Jarrett to the city planning department. Later, when Jarrett chaired the Chicago Transit Authority, Michelle volunteered to lead the citizens advisory board. In 1993, she started the Chicago chapter of Public Allies, an AmeriCorps program that trains young people through internships at nonprofits.

"Michelle," says Jarrett, "is really good at taking nothing and creating something."

In 1996, recruited again by Jarrett, she decamped for the University of Chicago and the first in a string of increasingly prominent community service and outreach jobs. She is now vice president for community and external affairs at the University of Chicago Medical Center, a liaison to impoverished and medically underserved black neighborhoods.