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Dime-store psychologists in Washington have tried to link Alma's much discussed clinical depression, which emerged in the mid-'80s, to the pressures of being the general's wife. Her family and friends sensibly reject the notion. "This is a medical condition that flares up and gets treated, the way a bad back gets treated," says Michael. "It's not central to her life." She is warm and outgoing, an attentive listener. She knows everybody but has just a few well-chosen close friends, most of them wives of current or former leaders of the defense or national-security apparatus: women married to men who can't talk about their work. When Colin retired, these wives got together and threw a bash for Alma--a slumber party with no husbands allowed.
It was a rare break from family, the abiding interest of her life. Last year Alma and Colin insisted that Michael and his family move in with them--for six months--while the young couple's new house was being built. Last week, shortly after Yitzhak Rabin's assassination and just as Colin was making his big decision, Alma called her sister in Alabama. "It was nice to hear from her," says Barbara Greene. "We talked about the grandkids." Anything else? "Just the grandkids." Alma never brought up the decision, and Greene never asked. "It wasn't on her mind," Greene says.
Nor did Alma ever bring up the Rabin assassination in conversation, says Michael. "She already knew the world was like that,'' he says. "This is a family that knows. The stories of my mother and grandfather sitting in the house with guns in their hands ready to shoot whoever came up the driveway are true. She grew up in Birmingham, Alabama. Little girls were blown up in churches for no reason."
In a segregated America, Alma Johnson was born into an extraordinary family, a tight-knit clan of teachers, principals, librarians and social workers, who helped form the core of Birmingham's black middle class. That community pushed the civil rights struggle as hard as any in America; the struggle was a fact of life, but it didn't define Alma. "We were going to school, falling in love, shopping for clothes, being teenagers," says her best friend from those days, Yvonne Hamilton. "Confronting white power wasn't high on our list." Whip smart, Alma graduated from high school at 16 and from college at 19, then went on to become an audiologist in Boston, where she met Colin. "She succeeded in part because she was mentored by powerful, directed adults who never for a moment considered themselves inferior to anyone," says Odessa Woolfolk, a schoolmate who is now the board president of the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute. Another friend calls this "the key to Alma--the reason she can go out and meet chiefs of state and be totally comfortable."