As for actual television, only one hour a night was allowed. But "somehow," her brother said, "she has managed to commit to memory every single episode of The Brady Bunch" Michelle and Craig both liked reading, and their mother kept them challenged with books that were ahead of what teachers expected them to read.
Downstairs in the two-story building was a separate apartment where one of Michelle's great-aunts lived. She was a piano teacher. Michelle took lessons from her. If ever there was a clue that Fraser and Marian had drawn lucky cards with their children, it was this: Michelle practiced without being pushed.
The house was on a street that ran just one block, so it had very little traffic. There was a park at one end. That meant plenty of room to play outside. When they were young, both Michelle and Craig were athletic. But as her brother began to excel in organized sports, Michelle turned her focus elsewhere. There was only so much following she would do, especially given the difficulty of matching Craig. From an early age, he showed the promise that led him to play professional basketball.
Fraser and Marian made it a point to let Michelle and Craig speak their minds, and to question authority. Marian remembered, "We told them, 'Make sure you respect your teachers, but don't hesitate to question them. Don't even allow us to just say anything to you. Ask us why.'" They did. A lot.
In Michelle's case, it's just as well that they didn't try to stop her. That probably would have been impossible. As soon as she could speak, she said what was on her mind, especially if she thought something was wrong. Her mother liked that. Marian didn't have that freedom when she was growing up. "I always resented it when I couldn't say what I felt," she remembered about her childhood. "I always felt like, 'What was wrong with me saying what I feel?'"
Michelle's elementary school, Bryn Mawr (now known as Bouchet Math and Science Academy), was around the corner from her house. By the time she enrolled in first grade, some of the teachers knew from Craig's example what they'd get from Michelle: a curious and demanding mind. However, it took Michelle a while to understand that Marian's relaxed attitude about kids speaking their minds wasn't shared by every teacher. If Michelle saw something she didn't think was right, she said so. If the teacher didn't respond as thoughtfully as Michelle expected—thanks to her parents' example—Michelle could lose her temper. One time a teacher complained to Marian, who just laughed. "Yeah, she's got a temper," Marian said. "But we decided to keep her anyway!"
What made Michelle angry, even then, was the difference between what she knew from home and what she saw in school. Craig remembered one of the lessons their father tried to pass on: "Life's not fair. It's not. And you don't always get what you deserve, but you have to work hard to get what you want. And then sometimes you don't get it; even if you work hard and do all the right things, you don't get it." All of that is true, and it's worth saying. But life was fair for Michelle at home, thanks to Fraser and Marian and Craig. So it wasn't easy for Michelle to understand why life shouldn't be fair everywhere.
Craig remembers how young Michelle saw the world: "When we were young kids, our parents divided the bedroom we shared so we could each have our own room. Many nights we would talk when we were supposed to be sleeping. My sister always talked about who was getting picked on at school or who was having a tough time at home. I didn't realize it then, but I realize it now: Those were the people she was going to dedicate her life to, the people who were struggling with life's challenges."
MOTHER KNOWS BEST
Even in elementary school, Fraser and Marian challenged Michelle. Marian was determined to keep Michelle ahead of teachers' expectations. Teaching Michelle to read at an early age was just the start. Fraser and Marian, who had both skipped second grade, made sure Craig and Michelle did the same. "If you aren't challenged, you don't make any progress," Marian later explained. Marian also brought home workbooks for Michelle and Craig, who learned early that good enough wasn't good enough.
Marian, like her husband and children, has a strong competitive streak. (After winning gold medals in sprinting in the Illinois Senior Olympics a few years after Michelle and Craig left for college, an injury slowed her down and she dropped out of racing. "If I can't do it fast, I'm not doing it," she said. "You don't run just to be running—you run to win.") She pushed Michelle and Craig academically as if she were coaching a sport.
"The academic part came first and early in our house," said Craig. "Our parents emphasized hard work and doing your best. Once you get trained like that, then you get used to it and you don't want to get anything but As and Bs."
Like a good coach, Marian pushed Michelle into new and challenging experiences. The school's program for advanced students began in the sixth grade, and Michelle was in it for the next three years, until graduation. She began studying French three years before most students were offered it in ninth grade. She took biology classes at Kennedy-King College.
Kennedy-King exposed her to more than just the inside of frogs. The college was almost four miles away from Bryn Mawr. Earlier than most of her classmates, Michelle was taking independent steps toward her education, searching it out rather than expecting it to come to her. The confidence she gained would soon lead her in unexpected directions.
But first, graduation: Michelle finished Bryn Mawr second in her class of more than one hundred students.
2. THE ROOTS
From when she was about ten years old, Michelle and her family made summertime visits to her grandparents in South Carolina. Fraser's father had been born there, and after retiring from work he and Fraser's mother moved back to his old hometown, a city on the coast, Georgetown. As Michelle and her family came to the end of their long drives from Chicago, the road would become flat and the fields alongside it would start to give off a marshy smell. This part of the South Carolina is known as "lowcountry," because a lot of the land is below sea level, leaving it soggy or flooded for most of the year.
When Michelle started to visit, she discovered she had many relatives in the area. Aunts, uncles, and cousins seemed to be all over Georgetown. But it wasn't until many years later, when Barack's campaign attracted the attention of reporters, that some of the most interesting details of the Robinson family's history began to emerge. The lowcountry marshes of South Carolina were once a center of America's economy and culture. The deep roots of Michelle's achievements are here.
ALL SAINTS
In the story of American slavery, Georgetown stands out. The fields in this area were home to several of the country's largest slave plantations.
The largest slave owner in the United States was Joshua J. Ward of Georgetown. By the start of the Civil War in 1861, he owned 1,130 slaves. At the time, an average slave owner in South Carolina owned fifteen slaves. The average in other states was lower. Across the country, only one owner in a hundred owned more than two hundred slaves.
Ward's neighbors included Robert Allston, who owned 631 slaves and was part of an extended family that owned several thousand, and J. Harleston Read, who owned 511 slaves.
The smallest plantation in the area around Georgetown (then known as All Saints Parish and now Georgetown County) had ninety slaves. The average had almost three hundred. These figures are several times more than the average found on farms and plantations in the rest of the country.
Why were there so many more slaves on the local plantations? Because of the crop that was grown there, rice. It requires many more workers than tobacco or cotton does. One hundred slaves might need as long as fifteen years to make an entire plantation ready. Rice grows best in flooded fields, so the slaves had to build a complex network of ditches and canals that could trap and release water according to the growing schedule. "It was back-breaking work," according to Pat Doyle, president of the Georgetown County Historical Society. "You had to clear the marsh, get the stumps up and put in dikes before you ever planted the first grain of rice."
It was also deadly. The swampy fields were home to alligators and poisonous snakes. The standing wate
r bred mosquitoes that spread malaria and yellow fever. Those diseases claimed many lives. "In the summers," writes historian William Dusinberre, "well-to-do people deserted Georgetown like the plague." The plantation owners "would no more have thought of passing a summer in Georgetown than of making a voluntary sojourn in Hades."
The intricate rice fields had to be tended constantly. The soil became muck and had to be cleared out of the ditches. Then the rice had to be harvested, which was a chore in itself. Rice is a heavy crop.
However, at the time, rice was a cash bonanza. The British government's rules about importing goods worked to the benefit of the Georgetown planters, who produced almost half of the rice grown in the United States. "No region offered such fabulous fortunes," writes historian William Freehling. Before the Revolutionary War, the owners of Georgetown's plantations were "perhaps America's richest entrepreneurs."
The slave community that created this wealth was also special. It was better able to preserve African traditions because it was more isolated from whites than most slave communities were. In all, more than eighty-five percent of the people living in All Saints Parish were African American—the highest percentage in the country. During the malaria season, when whites left the area, that number rose to ninety-eight percent. One local planter wrote, "I am actually so startled at the sight of a white face that I avoid my own ... in the [mirror] in the morning."
The result of this separation was a special culture that came to be called Gullah. Its sources were the rice-producing regions of Africa, such as Senegal, Gambia, and Sierra Leone. Slave traders called this the "rice coast." The Georgetown plantation owners strongly preferred slaves from this region. Many of these Africans were already resistant to malaria. They arrived in South Carolina with a knowledge of rice farming. Gullah is a mix of the cultures brought to America. For example, although the Gullah language is based on English, it borrows many of its words and much of its grammar from African languages.
At one time, Gullah culture could be found from North Carolina to Florida. Its heart, however, was in All Saints Parish. (It's still a strong presence in South Carolina and Georgia.) Historian Charles Joyner has called All Saints Parish "a seedbed of black culture in the United States." That also makes it a seedbed of American culture in general. Just one example: When kindergarten students learn the song "Michael, Row the Boat Ashore," they're singing a Gullah hymn. This self-reliant community is where the American era of Michelle's family story begins.
On summer vacations, young Michelle and her family drove into Georgetown on a highway that became the city's Highmarket Street. This road once connected some of the rice plantations to the downtown port section of Georgetown. Cruising along, none of the Robinsons ever noticed an unmarked dirt side road, about five miles from downtown, that disappeared into a forest of large oak trees. This road led to Friendfield, the old rice plantation where Michelle's great-great-grandfather, Jim Robinson, was a slave.
FRIENDFIELD
Friendfield still exists, though it's no longer a working rice farm. Now the overgrown paddies give it the look of a nature preserve. But many of the old canals dug by slaves remain. More astonishing, some of the old slave cabins are still there too. Small, simple buildings of plain boards, they now seem to be far removed from the owner's house. Once, however, these cabins were the most important buildings on the property, and the people who lived here knew that nothing got done at Friendfield unless they did it.
When Jim Robinson was born, around 1850, Friendfield was already a century old. James Withers, the son of the original owner, had just died a few years before. Born before the Revolutionary War, Withers had collected a huge fortune from the plantation. The rice harvested by the Friendfield slaves allowed him to buy land throughout the area and to make generous cash gifts to his family.
Withers built Friendfield's "big house," as the owners' mansions were called. It immediately became one of most admired homes in the state when it was built in 1818. The governor of South Carolina came to the celebration to mark its completion. Although it burned down to its foundations in 1926, it is still considered historically important. Photographs taken of the interiors before the fire appear in art books. (The house was later rebuilt using the original floor plan, then finished with decorations taken from a nearby house of the same era.)
There was nothing modest about the house, which was meant to display Withers's wealth. It could have stood as the model for Scarlett O'Hara's home in Gone With the Wind. The wrought-iron porch railings were intricate. A wide circular staircase ran from the entry room to the second and third floors. The ceilings in its large rooms were thirteen feet tall. The windows, also oversized, were covered by curtains of red velvet. The house had a large library, of course. Many if not most of the books would have been imported from Great Britain. The doorknobs were imported ceramic and sterling silver rather than local iron. The living room had a large marble fireplace and careful paneling.
From the time the house was first built, through Michelle's great-great-grandfather's life, and into the twentieth century, the house had another distinctive decoration for which it's still known today: hand-painted scenic wallpaper from France. All the house's owners were proud of it. Created by a prestigious firm, the wallpaper showed the important monuments of Paris, such as Notre Dame Cathedral and the Luxembourg Palace. (The Eiffel Tower was a few decades in the future.) The paper was eight-and-a-half feet tall and forty-eight feet from end to end. Two hundred and fifty artists worked on it. From a modern perspective, it may seem like an unusual way to display wealth and good taste, but it was the height of style when Friendfield was built. Some of the most notable houses of that period were decorated with similar designs. A set of the same scene from another home of Friendfield's era is on permanent display at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. The best examples are found in another famous home from that period, also built by slaves: the White House.
One more detail about Friendfield is worth mentioning. The slaves who dug canals in the rice fields then did the same near the big house. In the late 1700s or early 1800s the plantation owners decided they wanted a large water garden, with canals that snaked around small islands planted with flowers and exotic trees. The slaves made it large enough, and dug the canals deep enough, so that a flat-bottomed boat could be paddled around the islands.
MEET THE ROBINSONS
It's not known how Michelle's great-great-grandfather Jim Robinson came to Friendfield. He might have been born there, or he might have come as a child. But he did live at Friendfield as a slave, and, after the Civil War, as a free man.
His last name, which he eventually passed on to Michelle, isn't much help. It's difficult to trace because "Robinson" was the name of several slave owners. There's a slave cemetery at Friendfield, but the few markers show only the slaves' first names. (Two more unmarked slave cemeteries are up the coast in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, where the family cemetery of Fairfield's original owners is located.) Also, some government records spell his name differently.
In 1860, just before the Civil War began, there were 273 slaves at Friendfield. Many stayed in the area after the Union's victory freed them. Some continued to work on the plantation. The family history passed down through the years isn't certain, but it seems that Jim Robinson was one of those workers. In government records from 1880, he's listed as a farmer. He might have been hired help, or he might have farmed a section of the plantation and paid for the land by giving the owner a share of the crop.
Michelle is descended from Jim Robinson's third son. Like her own father, he was named Fraser. He was born in 1884, almost twenty years after freedom came to the slaves of South Carolina.
In common with most children of the time, Fraser was illiterate. South Carolina no longer had laws that prevented slaves from learning to read or write, but the state's African American children were still expected to work rather than go to school. There were exceptions, of course: Claflin University, Benedict College
, and Allen University had already been founded. Historian Charles Joyner quotes a former slave, Ben Horry, who understood the power of early literacy for each new generation of African Americans: "You had the learning in your head. Give me that pencil to catch up!" However, for a child like Fraser, education wasn't assumed. Then when he was ten years old something happened to change his life.
He was in the brush near his home, collecting firewood, when a tree fell the wrong way and broke his arm. According to family history, his stepmother didn't think the wound was serious, and didn't treat it properly. The wound then became badly infected. (This version may have been influenced by ten-year-old Fraser's feelings about his stepmother. They didn't get along. Maybe the wound became infected simply because Fraser was a young boy living in a swampy, rural area, and he didn't keep his arm clean.) The infection threatened to spread, which could have killed Fraser. A decision was made. His left arm was amputated.
Despite the tragedy, Fraser's spirits bounced back. His attitude would have been familiar to Michelle: It was the same attitude Fraser's grandson, her father, had about multiple sclerosis. Never complain about it. Never give in to it. Another family legacy.
A neighbor, Frank Nesmith, took notice of the young man. Fraser made himself Nesmith's sidekick. In time, Nesmith asked Fraser's father, Jim, if Fraser could move in with the Nesmith family. It would give everyone a break from the conflicts between Fraser and his stepmother. Nesmith promised to take care of Fraser. Jim Robinson agreed.
Nesmith, about thirty years old, was married and had a young daughter. Government records from just a few years later, 1900, show the family living in downtown Georgetown. There were two Nesmith girls then, ages seven and one. Nesmith's occupation was listed as train conductor. Fraser, age sixteen, was listed as "house boy." (His last name was listed as "Roberson," as it would be in some government records for the next thirty years.) He still had not learned to read and write, but that would soon change.
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