Michelle-Style

Quoted via New York Magazine:

To reach the home of George Obama, the president’s youngest half-brother, you skirt around the skyscrapers of central Nairobi and head north twenty minutes toward Huruma, one link in a necklace of slums that encircles the Kenyan capital. Turning off a half-built highway, you plunge into a warren of honking cars, minibus taxis, stray cows, and open roadside sewers. In the afternoon, Huruma’s alleys flood with children in neat school uniforms who skip past clapboard kiosks selling cigarettes, sodas, eggs, and detergent. You stop at a soccer field, an uneven red-dust pitch with netless goals, and ask one of the young men who are standing around in knots whether they’ve seen George. Everybody knows him: He used to be a quite a soccer player. You get directions to his house, a single-story tin-and-cinderblock structure, and finding it empty, manage to cadge his cell-phone number from a neighbor. You call George and then you wait.

Eventually, he appears with an entourage of young men, who fan across the gravel alley, like a street gang readying for a rumble. George is the tallest and the skinniest and clearly the leader, striking a 27-year-old’s cocksure pose, his elbows jutting, his long slender fingers delicately holding a cigarette. In his height, slim build, and long, expressive face, you can catch a glimpse of his half-brother, Barack. But the resemblance is obscured by evidence of a harder life: George’s eyes are misty, narrowed into slits by heavy lids, and his arms are flecked with scars. The product of a relationship between Barack Hussein Obama Sr. and a Kenyan woman named Jael Otieno, George never knew his father, who died when he was 6 months old. You hold up a hand in greeting as you walk across swirled scraps of paper and discarded plastic, and explain why you’d like to talk. A barefoot child scurries over to hand George another couple of smokes, bought individually for a few shillings from a nearby kiosk. As he clamps one between his lips and lights up, George shivers despite the midday warmth. more

Quoted via NYTimes:

Fraser Robinson III and his wife, Marian, with their children, Craig and Michelle, now the first lady.WASHINGTON — In 1850, the elderly master of a South Carolina estate took pen in hand and painstakingly divided up his possessions. Among the spinning wheels, scythes, tablecloths and cattle that he bequeathed to his far-flung heirs was a 6-year-old slave girl valued soon afterward at $475.

Click to read more ...