YLONDA GAULT CAVINESS
We go way back. Back to the enchanting little-Black-girl rhythms of wooden paddle balls, jacks and double Dutch ditties: “Ice cream, ice cream; cherry on top. How many boyfriends does ’Chelle got? 1-2-3-4…”
We go back like well-greased afro puffs, boney knees and narrow hips—shaking till our backbones slip. Back like playing the dozens with Pumkin, June Bug and Tiny—whose pretty moon face and wide-bodied frame never let a honeybun go unloved. We shared secrets, dance moves, Right On! magazine centerfolds and grape Now & Laters.
It was the 1970s. She and I reveled in our Blackness, in our fineness—at the same damn time. Modest means did not define us, instead emboldened us, sharpened our senses—granting license to cast the “don’t-come-for-me” stank-eye to any interloper out to test the bad-assery we wore with the ease and pride of bold-printed culottes.
Please! I been knowing Michelle LaVaughn Robinson. Her power, her style, her stance, her cadence—every idiosyncrasy, including the single raised eyebrow and pursed lip half-smile—is as familiar to me as stove-top hot combs and fried chicken gizzards. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, you better ask somebody.
Just don’t ask ’Chelle. When she burst on to the national scene as Mrs. Barack Obama a decade ago, she and I needed no introduction. We are old friends.
My girl does not suffer foolishness. She will graciously oblige but, with a knowing look, I can tell that she is not here for simple-minded queries into her intrinsic strength, her mother wit, or her straight-up truth.
I saw it back in 2007, when 60 Minutes’ Steve Kroft asked if she feared for her husband’s safety as a presidential candidate, Michelle Obama looked dead in the camera: “The reality is that as a Black man, Barack can get shot at the gas station.”
Translation: “Please. We all know what time it is.”
Months later, she gave me and other women an insider wink with CNN’s Larry King. In an attempt to contrast the Bush administration’s stubborn stance on warring with Iraq, King wanted to know if the then-presumptive presidential nominee had a mind that could be changed. “I change it every day,” she deadpanned.
In other words: “You better recognize.”
The white media establishment was not ready. New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd wrote: “She came on strong … I wince a bit when Michelle Obama chides … casting Barack as an undisciplined child.”
Days later, when Mrs. Obama sat her tall, dark and lovely self down with The View’s round-tabled hosts, Barbara Walters wanted her reaction to the piece: “I can’t even give that any attention…” Michelle said. “She [Dowd] doesn’t know me … [or] what’s going on in our household.”
Paraphrase: “Girl, bye.”
Mrs. Obama does not back down. No, she didn’t stutter in February 2008 when we heard her say, “For the first time in my adult lifetime, I am really proud of my country.” Clarifying the statement on The View, she countered that “only in America” could working-class parents on the South Side of Chicago send her and her brother to Princeton University. But until primary voters turned out in such large numbers, she was not certain “we, as a nation,” could look past race.
In other words: “I ain’t sorry.”
Why should she be apologetic? Come to think of it, why should I? Michelle did not come to play. Yes, she is proud in her role as Mrs. Obama and, rightly so, she gives Barack his propers all day long, loving and supporting his candidacy. But she never set out to function as a mere prop to his—or anyone else’s—agenda. Fearlessly and fiercely, everything about this startling “bad-mama-jamma” from the Chi shouted to the world: I am a strong Black woman. And not strong in that long-suffering, carrying-the-burdens-of-generations way many of us have come to know from our mamas, their mamas and the mamas before them. Strong in a brand-new way. A strong that declares, “You don’t get to define me. Only I get to define me.”
It may seem like a reach; certainly my intention is not to disrespect our ancestors in any way. But Michelle Obama set me free!
Probably, she set all women free, in a way. Sojourner Truth once said: “If women want rights more than they got, why don’t they just take them and not be talking about it?”