To the First Lady, With Love Four thank-you notes to Michelle Obama, who has spent the past eight years quietly and confidently changing the course of American history. By CHIMAMANDA NGOZI ADICHIE, GLORIA STEINEM, JON MEACHAM and RASHIDA JONE


“I
love this country,” she said to applause. She needed to say it — her
salve to the hostility of people who claimed she was unpatriotic because
she had dared to suggest that, as an adult, she had not always been
proud of her country.

Of
course she loved her country. The story of her life as she told it was
wholesomely American, drenched in nostalgia: a father who worked shifts
and a mother who stayed home, an almost mythic account of self-reliance,
of moderation, of working-class contentment. But she is also a
descendant of slaves, those full human beings considered human fractions
by the American state. And ambivalence should be her birthright. For
me, a foreign-raised person who likes America, one of its greatest
curiosities is this: that those who have the most reason for dissent are
those least allowed dissent.
Michelle
Obama was speaking. I felt protective of her because she was speaking
to an America often too quick to read a black woman’s confidence as
arrogance, her straightforwardness as entitlement.
She
was informal, colloquial, her sentences bookended by the word “see,” a
conversational fillip that also strangely felt like a mark of
authenticity. She seemed genuine. She was genuine. All over America,
black women were still, their eyes watching a form of God, because she
represented their image writ large in the world.
Her
speech was vibrant, a success. But there was, in her eyes and beneath
her delivery and in her few small stumbles, a glimpse of something
somber. A tight, dark ball of apprehension. As though she feared eight
years of holding her breath, of living her life with a stone in her gut.
Eight
years later, her blue dress was simpler but not as eager to be
appropriate; its sheen, and her edgy hoop earrings, made clear that she
was no longer auditioning.
Her
daughters were grown. She had shielded them and celebrated them, and
they appeared in public always picture perfect, as though their careful
grooming was a kind of reproach. She had called herself mom-in-chief,
and cloaked in that nonthreatening title, had done what she cared about.

Michelle Obama is featured on one of the covers of T's Oct. 23 Greats issue.
See the other six covers.
She
embraced veterans and military families, and became their listening
advocate. She threw open the White House doors to people on the margins
of America. She was working class, and she was Princeton, and so she
could speak of opportunity as a tangible thing. Her program Reach Higher
pushed high schoolers to go further, to want more. She jumped rope with
children on the White House grounds as part of her initiative to combat
childhood obesity. She grew a vegetable garden and campaigned for
healthier food in schools. She reached across borders and cast her light
on the education of girls all over the world. She danced on television
shows. She hugged more people than any first lady ever has, and she made
“first lady” mean a person warmly accessible, a person both normal and
inspirational and a person many degrees of cool.
She
had become an American style icon. Her dresses and workouts. Her
carriage and curves. Toned arms and long slender fingers. Even her
favored kitten heels, for women who cannot fathom wearing shoes in the
halfway house between flats and high heels, have earned a certain
respect because of her. No public figure better embodies that mantra of
full female selfhood: Wear what you like.
It
was the 2016 Democratic Convention. Michelle Obama was speaking. She
said “black boy” and “slaves,” words she would not have said eight years
ago because eight years ago any concrete gesturing to blackness would
have had real consequences.

She
was relaxed, emotional, sentimental. Her uncertainties laid to rest.
Her rhythm was subtler, because she no longer needed it as her armor,
because she had conquered.
The
insults, those barefaced and those adorned as jokes, the acidic
scrutiny, the manufactured scandals, the base questioning of legitimacy,
the tone of disrespect, so ubiquitous, so casual. She had faced them
and sometimes she hurt and sometimes she blinked but throughout she
remained herself.
Michelle
Obama was speaking. I realized then that she hadn’t been waiting to
exhale these past eight years. She had been letting that breath out, in
small movements, careful because she had to be, but exhaling still.
Chimamanda
Ngozi Adichie is the author of the novel “Americanah” and the
book-length essay “We Should All Be Feminists.” A recipient of a
MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant, her words have been sampled by
Beyoncé and, most recently, on clothing from Dior’s spring 2017
collection.
By Gloria Steinem:Michelle Obama came into my life in stages. I knew that, like her husband, she was a Harvard-educated lawyer, but that unlike him, she had grown up on the South Side of Chicago, with parents who had not gone to college. When Barack Obama was a summer associate at her Chicago law firm, they met because she was his mentor. After his successful campaign for the U.S. Senate, I noticed that she chose not to go to Washington. Instead, he commuted to their home and two daughters in Chicago where Michelle had a big job as head of community affairs for a hospital.

Recently,
over the course of the Trump-Clinton presidential campaign, Michelle
has become one of the most effective public speakers of our time. That’s
serious. To be less serious, she has always been a woman who knows the
difference between fashion (what outside forces tell you to wear) and
style (the way you express a unique self). At one lunch in the White
House for women who had been spokespeople and supporters in President
Obama’s second campaign, she invited local public school children to
sing and perform. Those students, mostly African-American kids, were
spirited, talented and at ease in a White House that belongs to them as
much as to anyone in this country, yet they wouldn’t have been there
without Michelle.
What
will she choose to do next? That’s up to her. She could do anything,
from becoming a U.S. senator from Illinois to campaigning for the safety
and education of girls globally. She could also choose to lead a
private life. Whatever she decides, I trust her judgment.
Though
I’m old enough to remember Eleanor and Franklin D. Roosevelt in the
White House — and all the couples and families since — I have never seen
such balance and equal parenting, such love, respect, mutuality and
pleasure in each other’s company. We will never have a democracy until
we have democratic families and a society without the invented
categories of both race and gender. Michelle Obama may have changed
history in the most powerful way — by example.
Gloria
Steinem, a feminist activist and writer, has been touring America,
campaigning for Hillary Clinton and promoting the paperback edition of
her travelogue “My Life on the Road.”
By Jon Meacham:
On
a lovely early autumn day in her final October in the White House,
Michelle Obama stepped out onto a sunny South Lawn and, in a way, bid
farewell. The setting was her celebrated organic kitchen garden, but the
subtext seemed to go far beyond any single initiative. “I have to tell
you that being here with all of you, overlooking this beautiful garden —
and it is beautiful — it’s kind of an emotional moment,” Mrs. Obama
said at a ceremony to unveil a bigger, fortified version of the garden.
“We’re having a lot of these emotional moments because everything is the
last. But this is particularly my baby, because this garden is where it
all started. So we’re really coming full circle back to the very
beginning.” She recalled conversations in 2008 about the role she might
play in an Obama presidency — and noted, tellingly, that the garden
emerged after “Barack actually won,” to which she added: “He won twice.”
The gathered guests happily applauded.

There,
in a way, was the essential Michelle Obama, or at least the essential
observable version of herself: speaking of broad public good (the
garden, which was part of her campaign against childhood obesity) while
revealing an arch sense of competitiveness.
My husband.... Read More...
No comments