Becoming: Chapter 1 Summary & Analysis

Much of Michelle Obama’s childhood is spent listening to the sound of “striving.” Her family lives in a second-floor apartment on the South Side of Chicago, while her great-aunt Robbie and great-uncle Terry live on the floor below. Robbie teaches piano in her home, and Michelle grows up listening to a multitude of students plunk out their songs.

The sounds of the piano fill Michelle’s bedroom and the living room, the only respite coming when her father turns on the Cubs game on TV. Michelle writes that America is “in the midst of a massive and uncertain shift” at the tail end of the 1960s—the Kennedys are dead, Martin Luther King Jr. has been assassinated, the Vietnam War is beginning, and white families are moving out of Chicago in droves.

Michelle is largely ignorant of the politics around her, as she is only a young girl at the time. Her family is “the center of everything.” Michelle’s mother teaches her to read early; her father teaches her and her older brother Craig to love jazz and art. Michelle and Craig are about two years apart, and they are very close.

The neighborhood in which Michelle lived as a baby was designed to “ease a post-World War II housing shortage for black working-class families.” But the neighborhood would later “deteriorate under the grind  of poverty and gang violence, becoming one of the city’s more dangerous places to live.” Now, as a young girl, Michelle lives in a nicer neighborhood on Euclid Avenue. Her family’s upstairs apartment, she writes, was probably meant for one or two people, but her family finds a way to make it work. There is sometimes friction between the upstairs and downstairs: she and Craig are noisy and young, while Robbie and Terry are older and a little grouchy, Michelle thinks.

But, Michelle acknowledges, Robbie and Terry had grown up in a different era. Robbie had once sued Northwestern University for discrimination, when she tried to take a music workshop there and had been denied a room in the women’s dorm. Terry had once been a Pullman porter on overnight passenger rail lines, a profession made up entirely of black men who kept their appearance “immaculate” while tending to the needs of train passengers. Michelle sees how the job had made him perpetually subservient, “never asserting himself in any way.”

Michelle decides to learn piano at four years old. By this point, she feels like she already has learned piano, if only by osmosis. She sees Robbie as someone to win over, as Robbie demands “excellence from every kid” who sits at her piano bench. Robbie teaches Michelle how to find middle C on the piano—helpfully, on Robbie’s very old and battered piano, middle C has a corner missing.

Piano comes naturally to Michelle, as she comes from a very musical family. Her grandfather, whom she and Craig call Southside, is particularly influential, introducing her to the music in his vast record collection. Southside doesn’t trust a lot about the world: he doesn’t trust dentists, the police, and often doesn’t trust white people, being the grandson of a Georgia slave and growing up in Alabama during the time of Jim Crow. Music, Michelle writes, is an antidote to his worries. He buys Michelle her first album and keeps a special shelf at his house for her favorite records.

At home, Michelle continues to work at piano. She acknowledges that she is “no less fumbling” but that she is more driven than other students. She is encouraged by the fact that the more she practices, the more she achieves. And she is excited when Robbie is pleased by her ability to play a song perfectly.

Michelle and Robbie might have continued their lessons very pleasantly, except that Michelle starts to peek ahead in the book and attempt new songs during her practice sessions. This makes Robbie angry, chastising Michelle for going ahead. Michelle, in turn, is stubborn, and asks why she can’t learn new songs. Michelle’s mother and father are amused by her feud with Robbie. Michelle explains that they usually don’t intervene in matters outside school; they appreciate her “feistiness” and she is glad that they keep that flame lit.

Once a year, Robbie holds a “fancy recital” for her students at a nice rehearsal hall, and Michelle’s father drives her there. Michelle writes about her father’s devotion to his car, which he calls the “Deuce and a Quarter.” He keeps the car immaculate and the family loves driving together. Years later, Michelle realizes what the car truly represents to her father. In his thirties, Michelle’s father began to feel the effects of multiple sclerosis, a neurological disease that involves a “a long and probably painful slide toward immobility.” And so, to her father, the car epitomizes a kind of freedom and the relief of being mobile.

At the recital, Michelle is nervous, and when it is her turn she walks to the front of the room to find a pristine baby grand piano. She is ready to play; she’s practiced her song rigorously. But, she realizes, she can’t find middle C. The piano is too perfect; it doesn’t have a conveniently chipped key. Michelle grows almost panicked, unable to start, but then she sees Robbie coming towards her. Robbie lays one finger on middle C and smiles encouragingly.