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1-Page Summary of Becoming
Overall Summary
Chapter 1
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, and her great-aunt Robbie teaches piano below. She listens to many students play their songs.
The piano music fills the living room and Michelle’s bedroom. The only relief comes when her father turns on the Cubs game on TV. She writes that America is in a state of flux at the tail end of the 1960s, with Kennedy’s assassination, Martin Luther King Jr.’s death, and Vietnam War beginning. White families are fleeing Chicago in droves as well.
Michelle is oblivious to the political climate in her town because she’s a young girl. Her family is very important to her, and they spend a lot of time together. Her mother taught Michelle how to read when she was very young, and her father introduced both Michelle and her older brother Craig to jazz music.
Michelle grew up in a housing project that was built to ease the shortage of housing for black working-class families after World War II. However, it later deteriorated under the grind of poverty and gang violence. Michelle’s family moved out of this dangerous environment and into another neighborhood on Euclid Avenue when she was a young girl. She writes about how her family lived in one apartment upstairs, while Robbie and Terry lived downstairs with their own children, Craig and Michelle.
But, Michelle acknowledges, Robbie and Terry had grown up in a different time. Robbie sued Northwestern University for discrimination when she was denied access to music classes because she was black. Terry also worked as a Pullman porter on overnight passenger rail lines, which were only open to blacks until the 1960s. Michelle sees how working in this job made him subservient and unable to assert himself at work or home.
Michelle learns to play the piano at a young age. She feels like she has learned enough by watching her brother, who is already playing. Her teacher expects perfection from everyone and demands that Michelle work hard for it as well. The teacher teaches Michelle how to find middle C on the keyboard—helpfully, middle C has a corner missing in her old and battered piano so Michelle can easily find it.
Michelle comes from a very musical family, and her grandfather is particularly influential. He introduces Michelle to music through his records and doesn’t trust many things. But he trusts music because it’s an antidote to the worries in life. Her grandfather buys her first album, which becomes one of her favorites, and keeps a special shelf for them at his house.
At home, Michelle continues to practice the piano. She’s not as good as other students but she is more driven than them and keeps practicing until she gets better. She also likes that her teacher appreciates her improvement. However, Michelle starts trying new songs during practice and Robbie gets mad at her for doing so because it makes him think she’s done with his lessons. They argue about this until their parents have to intervene in order to get them back on track with their lessons again.
Once a year, Robbie holds a fancy recital for her students at a nice rehearsal hall. Michelle’s father drives her there in his immaculate car, which he calls the “Deuce and a Quarter.” He keeps the family safe when they drive together. Years later, Michelle realizes what the car truly represents to her father: freedom from MS (Multiple Sclerosis). In his thirties, he began to feel effects of multiple sclerosis—a long slide into immobility. And so the Deuce and a Quarter epitomizes that relief; it means mobility.
