The Bridge: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama

by David Remnick

  After the Electoral College count tipped past 270, the decisive number, the Obamas--Barack, Michelle, Malia, and Sasha--walked out on the Grant Park stage. What broke out is what can best be described as well-mannered pandemonium: crying, flag-waving, the embracing of friends and strangers. In his concession speech, McCain paid gracious tribute to the moment. The cameras captured Jesse Jackson standing alone, tears streaming down his face. The cynical interpretation was that they were crocodile tears, fakery, tears of regret that he wasn't the one on the stage. When I had the chance later to ask Jackson about the moment, he said that he had been thinking that night of Emmett Till, of Rosa Parks, of Martin Luther King at the Lincoln Memorial, the march in Selma. "And in my own head I saw the funerals," he said. "I wish Dr. King and Malcolm could have been there for, like, just thirty seconds, just to see what they got killed about. That's when I began to well up and cried. Think about the martyrs: Fannie Lou Hamer, if she could have just been there for just a minute." He thought of a trip to Europe where people were telling him that Obama could never win. "It was all converged in my consciousness, both the journey to get there and the joy of the moment. I was in awe. I could see Dr. King putting on his shoes in Selma, getting ready to march, and Jim Farmer, and John Lewis--all of them. These were the people who made this day happen."

  When the cheering finally quieted down, Obama gave a brisk and moving speech, one of thanks, unification, and promise. And, as he had so many times before, he called on a personal story to embody the sense of the moment, the emotions in the air. Earlier in the campaign it had been Ashley Baia, a young volunteer in South Carolina. Now it was Ann Nixon Cooper, who, at the age of a hundred and six, had just voted for him in Atlanta. Cooper was the grandmother of Lawrence Bobo, a sociologist at Harvard and one of the most prominent African-American academics in the country. Bobo's scholarly work centered on the complexities and changes in racial attitudes among whites and blacks. The Obama campaign had called Bobo's grandmother and said that he might mention her in the speech--campaign aides had seen her interviewed on CNN--but the family had no idea that the President-elect would take her life to show the passage from suffering to suffrage and then the moment of his ascension:

  She was born just a generation past slavery; a time when there were no cars on the road or planes in the sky; when someone like her couldn't vote for two reasons--because she was a woman and because of the color of her skin. And tonight I think about all that she's seen throughout her century in America--the heartache and the hope; the struggle and the progress; the times we were told that we can't, and the people who pressed on with that American creed: Yes, we can.

  At a time when women's voices were silenced and their hopes dismissed, she lived to see them stand up and speak out and reach for the ballot. Yes, we can.

  When there was despair in the Dust Bowl and depression across the land, she saw a nation conquer fear itself with a New Deal, new jobs, and a new sense of common purpose. Yes, we can.

  When the bombs fell on our harbor and tyranny threatened the world, she was there to witness a generation rise to greatness and a democracy was saved. Yes, we can.

  She was there for the buses in Montgomery, the hoses in Birmingham, a bridge in Selma, and a preacher from Atlanta who told a people that "We Shall Overcome." Yes, we can.

  A man touched down on the moon, a wall came down in Berlin, a world was connected by our own science and imagination. And this year, in this election, she touched her finger to a screen, and cast her vote, because after a hundred and six years in America, through the best of times and the darkest of hours, she knows how America can change.

  Yes, we can.

  On a night of triumph, Obama's tone was not triumphal, it was not ringing; his tone was grave. Having cast himself in Selma twenty months earlier as one who stood on the "shoulders of giants," as the leader of the Joshua generation, he hardly had to mention race. It was the thing always present, the thing so rarely named. He had simultaneously celebrated identity and eased it into the background. Ann Nixon Cooper was an emblem not only of her race, but of her nation.

  "Change has come to America," Obama declared, and, in a park best remembered until now as the place where, forty summers ago, police did outrageous battle with antiwar protesters, everyone knew that change had come, and that--how long? too long--it was about damned time.

  Chapter Seventeen

  To the White House

  Two centuries before Barack Obama ran for President, slaves built the White House. They quarried stone in Virginia, made nails and baked bricks in Georgetown. West Africans by heritage, they had no last names or carried the names of their masters. The records tell us that they went by "Tom," "Peter," "Ben," "Harry," "Daniel," and so on. Three slaves at the White House construction site were on loan from its architect, an Irishman from Charleston named James Hoban. One of his slaves was designated "Negro Peter." Hoban designed the President's mansion to look like Leinster House, in Dublin, but there are echoes, too, of a Southern plantation house. Sometimes, the slaves were given the equivalent of a dollar a day, but nearly all of their wages were passed along to their owners. Working alongside free blacks and white European laborers, the slaves helped build Washington along the designs of Pierre-Charles L'Enfant and the architects of Europe. They built the Capitol dome. They cleared the woods and dug up the stumps near the Potomac. They drained swamps. And, not far from the building site of the White House, auctioneers from the Virginia-based firm of Franklin & Armfield sold new slaves. Cash changed hands as frightened young blacks, held in pens, shackled, dressed in rags, stared out at their new masters. Soon they would be boarded on steamships and sent to Natchez, Charleston, Mobile, and New Orleans.

  There were many reasons that the founding generation finally voted to move the capital south to Washington. One was the requirements of construction, another the politics of slavery in the North. "Can one imagine a succession of twelve slaveholder presidents if the capital had remained in Philadelphia?" Garry Wills writes in his study of Jefferson, Negro President. "The southerners got what they wanted, a seat of government where slavery would be taken for granted, where it would not need perpetual apology, excuse, or palliation, where the most honored men in the nation were not to be criticized because they practiced and defended and gave privilege to the holding of slaves."

  At the end of the eighteenth century, hundreds of slaves were working on federal buildings in the new capital. "To the Southern-born, the district now presented the reassuringly familiar panorama of a plantation work site," the historian Fergus M. Bordewich writes, "with white overseers directing black workmen grubbing stumps, hauling timber, dragging sledges, digging foundations, toting baskets of stone, bushels of lime, and kegs of nails, chiseling stone, stirring mortar, and tending brick kilns. Wherever buildings were under construction, including the Capitol and the President's House, teams of enslaved sawyers in broad-brimmed hats could be seen sweating at their work in the sawpits beneath cascades of sawdust, slicing logs into boards, with the rhythmic, angled, back-breaking strokes of a six-foot blade."

  Construction had begun on the White House in 1792, and, by 1798, around ninety black men were working at the site and on the Capitol. On a given day, about five or six slaves were out sick, laid up in a makeshift clinic. The commissioners employed one Dr. May to care for them. They spent fifty cents a day on treatment.

  Twelve Presidents owned slaves, eight of them while in office. John and Abigail Adams, the first inhabitants of the White House, were, by the standards of the day, abolitionists, and, at the White House, they kept only two servants, a white farm couple. Their idealism was rewarded by the many guests who mocked their food, their housekeeping, and their hospitality. Thomas Jefferson brought to the White House members of his considerable household staff, including a few slaves. James and Dolley Madison brought more. The most famous of Madison's slaves was his "body servant," Paul Jennings, who was born on Madison's estate, in Montpelier, Virginia. Jennings's father wa
s an English trader, his mother a slave. At the White House, Jennings was in constant contact with the President and became the executive mansion's first tell-all memoirist, leaving behind a short manuscript titled "A Colored Man's Reminiscences of James Madison." He was a young man when he served Madison and saw the British attack the White House. Jennings recalled Dolley Madison grabbing what valuables she could and stuffing them in her reticule before fleeing the White House; he recalled the "rabble" that raided the mansion soon afterward and "stole lots of silver and whatever they could lay their hands on." Although Jennings was, like jewelry or a horse, Madison's property, a commodity, he wrote with tender and forgiving affection for the President. "Mr. Madison, I think, was one of the best men that ever lived," he wrote, and went on:

  I never saw him in a passion, and never knew him to strike a slave, although he had over one hundred; neither would he allow an overseer to do it. Whenever any slaves were reported as stealing or "cutting up" badly, he would send for them and admonish them privately, and never mortify them before others. They generally served him very faithfully....

  He often told the story, that one day riding home from court with old Tom Barbour (father of Governor Barbour), they met a colored man who took off his hat. Mr. M. raised his, to the surprise of old Tom; to whom Mr. M. replied, "I never allow a Negro to excel me in politeness."

  Jennings was a loyal servant, who stayed with Madison in his retirement, deteriorating health, and, finally, his death. As in so many slave manuscripts, the narrator asserts his own selfhood, his dignity, through the power of loyalty and his sympathy for the "family" that owns him:

  I was always with Mr. Madison till he died, and shaved him every other day for sixteen years. For six months before his death, he was unable to walk, and spent most of his time reclined on a couch; but his mind was bright, and with his numerous visitors he talked with as much animation and strength of voice as I ever heard him in his best days. I was present when he died. That morning Sukey brought him his breakfast, as usual. He could not swallow. His niece, Mrs. Willis, said, "What is the matter, Uncle James?" "Nothing more than a change of mind, my dear."

  His head instantly dropped, and he ceased breathing as quietly as the snuff of a candle goes out. He was about eighty-four years old, and was followed to the grave by an immense procession of white and colored people.

  Jennings died in 1874, when he was seventy-five. In his lifetime, he took part in an abolitionist plot to free slaves on a Washington schooner, worked for Daniel Webster (from whom he bought his freedom), and, toward the end of his life, served in the Department of the Interior.

  Nearly all of the hundreds of slaves who followed Jennings in service at the White House worked in livery and died in anonymity. They wrote no memoirs and left barely a trace in the archives. Andrew Jackson brought his slaves to Washington, D.C., from his estate in Tennessee but little is known about the "body servant" who shared his bedroom in the White House. We do know that James Polk bought slaves even while President, paying, on July 20, 1846, a total of $1,436 for "Hartwell & his wife & her child nine years old." In the eighteen-fifties, slaves were eliminated from the White House staff not because of any doubts about the morality of chattel slavery, but, rather, because James Buchanan thought that white British servants would better preserve his daily privacy.

  Abraham and Mary Todd Lincoln had no slaves in the White House. Their servants were either from their household in Illinois or white Europeans inherited from the previous Administration. They did, however, employ a black dressmaker, a modiste, named Lizzy--Elizabeth Keckley--who was born a slave in Dinwiddie Courthouse, Virginia, near Petersburg. No black man or woman, not even Paul Jennings, ever knew such intimacy with a First Family, and what is most remarkable about Keckley is that she left behind a memoir called Behind the Scenes, or, Thirty Years a Slave, and Four Years in the White House, which, in its way, stands with the slave narratives and memoirs that make up the core of early African-American literature. Like Sojourner Truth, Harriet Jacobs, and other slaves who gained their freedom and became the authors of narratives of their lives, Keckley wrote to assert her literacy, her history, her status as a thinking, feeling being. She was not as profound a memoirist as Harriet Jacobs, or Booker T. Washington, or W. E. B. DuBois, but her view of the world was unlike any other. Her testimony came from the living quarters of the White House, from within the confidence and embrace of the Lincoln family.

  Keckley's mother was a slave named Agnes. Her father was her mother's master, an Army colonel named Armistead Burwell. Elizabeth learned her father's identity many years later when her mother was on her deathbed. As a child of four, she started working in the Burwell household. Keckley called slavery a "cruel custom" by which "I was robbed of my dearest right" and yet, much like Jennings before her, she displayed an understanding of the predicament of the slave master that, to us, seems shockingly sympathetic. She expresses an empathy for her owners--owners who did not hesitate to torture her--simply because they, too, had been born into the social and economic system of slavery.

  Considering the cruelties Keckley endured, her equanimity seems beyond the capacities of a saint. When she was living in Hillsboro, North Carolina, where Burwell was in charge of a Presbyterian church, a Mr. Bingham ran the school and often visited the parsonage. One day, without evident reason Bingham demanded that she lower her dress to receive a whipping. Keckley relates that she feared most for her sense of modesty. She was, she tells us, eighteen "and fully developed." Bingham binds her hands, tears her dress, and picks up a rawhide, "the instrument of torture":

  I can feel the torture now--the terrible, excruciating agony of those moments. I did not scream; I was too proud to let my tormentor know what I was suffering.

  Even in this unnervingly balanced narrative--a narrative without the hint of rebellion or abolitionist fervor--there is no doubting the extent of the slave master's depravity. Some slaves, Keckley reports, preferred to die rather than suffer any longer. When her uncle makes an absent-minded mistake on the farm, losing a pair of plow lines, he so fears the result, the thrashing and humiliation that will surely be his, that he hangs himself from a willow tree "rather than meet the displeasure of his master."

  The dominion of the slave master was limitless. The slave enjoyed no private realm, no right of family or sexual protection. For four years, Keckley worked in North Carolina for a man named Alexander Kirkland, who raped her at his whim. The resulting pregnancy "brought me suffering and deep mortification" and the unbearable thought that she was bearing a son who could not possibly escape the fate of his mother and every other slave.

  Keckley understood well the outrageous hypocrisy of her masters, "who preached the love of Heaven, who glorified the precepts and examples of Christ, who expounded the Holy Scriptures Sabbath after Sabbath from the pulpit," and yet treated her with no more regard than a dog. And still, like Booker T. Washington in his memoirs a half-century later, Keckley writes of slavery as a "school" in which she learned her humanity.

  Eventually, she made her way to St. Louis and, by 1855, had bought her freedom. She married but refused to have any more children--"I could not bear the thought of ... adding one single recruit to the millions bound to hopeless servitude." Instead, she developed her skills as a seamstress and moved on to Washington, D.C., where she developed a business as a dressmaker; she came to work for the wives of Robert E. Lee and Jefferson Davis and admitted to a "great desire to work for the ladies of the White House."

  On the day of Lincoln's first inauguration, Keckley was summoned to Willard's Hotel for a private interview with Mary Lincoln. Mrs. Lincoln had spilled coffee on the dress she was going to wear that evening after the swearing-in ceremonies; the stain, Keckley realized, had "rendered it necessary that she should have a new one for the occasion." Keckley set to work on a dress for the new First Lady. While she worked, the Lincolns talked amiably.

  "You seem to be in a poetical mood to-night," said his wife.

  "Y
es, mother, these are poetical times" was his pleasant reply. "I declare, you look charming in that dress. Mrs. Keckley has met with great success."

  Then, Keckley recalls, "Mrs. Lincoln took the President's arm, and with smiling face led the train below. I was surprised at her grace and composure. I had heard so much, in current and malicious report, of her low life, of her ignorance and vulgarity, that I expected to see her embarrassed on this occasion. Report, I soon saw, was wrong. No queen, accustomed to the usages of royalty all her life, could have comported herself with more calmness and dignity than did the wife of the President."

  The Lincolns allowed Lizzy a remarkable intimacy with the household. She seems to have been in the living quarters much more frequently than dressmaking would have required. "I consider you my best living friend," Mrs. Lincoln later wrote to her. On the evening of a White House reception, she was in Mrs. Lincoln's bedroom attending to her hair and dress ("White satin, trimmed with black lace") while eleven-year-old Willie lay ill. His parents were terribly worried and considered canceling the reception, but the doctor told them that there was no immediate cause for alarm. The Lincolns went downstairs, and Keckley, sitting in the sickroom with Willie, could hear the "rich notes" of the Marine Band in the apartments below--the "subdued murmurs, like the wild, faint sobbing of far-off spirits." Mrs. Lincoln came upstairs several times to check on Willie. The boy's fever grew worse through the night. Days later, his condition became grave, and then he died. Almost immediately, the Lincolns summoned Keckley to the White House to deal with the gruesome and heartbreaking details: "I assisted in washing him and dressing him, and then laid him on the bed, when Mr. Lincoln came in. I never saw a man so bowed down with grief. He came to the bed, lifted the cover from the face of his child, gazed at it long and earnestly, murmuring, 'My poor boy, he was too good for this earth. God has called him home.'"