Her marriage … her mission and … her mid-life transformation - Sharon Pratt Kelley

Ebony, Feb, 1992 by Laura B. Randolph

NO one took Sharon Pratt Kelly seriously when she announced she was running for mayor of the nation's capital. Get real, scoffed the experts when she hit the streets, declaring "It's time to clean house," and then had the gall to denounce Marion Barry, the city's once invincible and much-loved three-term mayor, for not resigning after his headline-making drug arrest. "Initially, no one thought she could win," acknowledges Benaree Wiley, Kelly's campaign finance director and only sister.

Why should they? For one thing, even though Kelly was a hometown girl, most of the city's residents had never heard of her.

For another, though she was the first Black and the first woman treasurer of the Democratic National Committee, she'd spent virtually her whole career as a alwyer and utility company executive and had zero experience in public office.

But most damaging of all, she was perceived by many as a member of the city's Black aristocracy, a "light-skinned, upper-middle class, bourgeois princess," who could never be elected in "Chocolate City."

Kelly ignored the pundits and hit the campaign trail hard, determined to dispel the perception she was this aloof and distant elitist who could never connect with the people. It worked. Though she's petite ("If it weren't for these hips, I'd be a perfect size 6") and stands only 5'2", in person, Kelly has a uniquely powerful physical presence. She's got this liquid, self-assured, take-no-mess gait--the stride of a woman who knows the party can't start until she arrives, and the sheer grace of her entry into a room is hypnotizing.

She's also a passionate and fiery speaker and when she flashes her 100-watt smile at you, it's over. The more she campaigned, the more the ice princess reputation melted away, and her "clean house" message was enough to put her over the top.

"People were tired of the status quo . . .," she says, explaining her stunning and historic election as the first Black woman major of a major city. "I just felt by some way or another, I wasn't sure what that way or another was, people would go for the person offering change."

Change--the deep down, transforming, you'll-never-be-the-same-again kind of change--is something with which Kelly has recently become intimately acquianted. It's not just the job, though she admits that since taking office in January 1991 she's seen her whole world transformed. A self-described "private" person, she now lives in a fish-bowl and her every move is subjected to meticulous scrutiny. "I was not," she says shaking her head, "accustomed to everything I do being on public display."

Her home, once her refuge, "now sometimes feels like a bus station and that is very hard for me to deal with," she admits. And conducting her three-year-romance-cum-marriage to 46-year-old banker-turned-businessman James Kelly III has been particularly difficult since the daily issues of life and marriage must be negotiated in public.

"It's not always that easy," she sighs when asked how she and her husband of two months have managed to make the relationship work. "But he's very balanced person . . . He's very spiritually anchored, which helps a lot. And he's very family-oriented, so he helps insulate me to some extent, which is a great blessing at this point in my life."

As Kelly will be the first to tell you, at this point in her life she sees her two-month marriage as "the beginning of a new and wonderful partnership." But for a long time after the breakup of her first marriage, her feelings about remarriage remained a clutter of unsettling emotions. "When I first divorced," she reveals, "I didn't think it was very likely. Of course you have to understand that I had this misconception that somebody in their 30s was ancient, so I figured it was out of the question."

In fact, says Kelly, she had "such a serious crisis when I turned 30 that 40 was easy." By all accounts, she's done a considerable amount of mellowing, mostly in the last 10 years, and today, at 48, the mayor says she's looser, less intense, that she's ever been.

"I've gotten younger with age because I've gotten more relaxed as I've matured and gotten more comfortable with who I am . . .," she confesses, glancing across the room to watch the logs burn in the fireplace of her City Hall office. "I think I have learned more about finding joy in life in my late 30s and 40s than I ever did in my teens and 20s."

That's because from the time she was a little girl, joy was an elusive commodity to Kelly. A few months before her fifth birthday, her mother died of breast cancer, and though her father, paternal aunt and grandmother lavished love on her and her sister, she's wrestled with her mother's loss in one way or another ever since.

"I think," says Kelly softly, "it had the clearest and most profound impact on my life. It made me appreciate how elusive life is. And it certainly had a tremendous impact in making family very important to me."

And so when, at 22, she married fellow Howard University student Arrington Dixon, she had no doubt that they would live happily ever after. Never having had the chance to bask in her mother's love, when her two daughters were born, she had no trouble putting her career on hold to be a stay-home mom.