Speaking Truth to Power (8 page)

Arriving in New Haven, I knew that my apprehension was justified. New Haven and Stillwater could not have been more foreign to one another. The first thing that I noticed was the cold. May in Connecticut felt more like March in Oklahoma. Not only was the temperature fifteen degrees lower, but it was measured with a Celsius thermometer—sparing me the satisfaction of protesting with absolute certainty just how much colder. In Stillwater I could look from the top floor of my dormitory and see beyond the edge of town to the surrounding pastures, miles across the flats. Neither trees nor buildings nor hills obstructed my view. New Haven, a small town by East Coast standards, stretched into endless suburbs—Woodbridge, West Haven, North Haven—and signs designating the various townships were the only lines of demarcation. In three years in New Haven I never found a vantage point that allowed me to see beyond the city boundaries to the countryside. I felt confined—able to escape only when time and finances allowed me to travel by train.

The Yale campus itself fulfilled my apprehension as well. Even the buildings were different. Ivy really
did
cover the walls of the Gothic-style structures so unlike the red brick buildings of Oklahoma State. And these differences seemed to have everything to do with tradition and expectation. And I feared that my early education at rural schools in Oklahoma and later in college was hardly adequate preparation for the top law school in the country.

I had decided to go to Yale rather than Harvard after visiting both. Yale, the smaller of the two, gave me the feeling of protection and security I needed for two major transitions—undergraduate to law school, public to Ivy League school. But once I got there I discovered that the small size only compensated so much for the inevitable feeling of being an outsider. However much those who direct the educational process perceive it as race and gender neutral, Yale cannot escape its history. (In many respects it does not want to.) It was designed for young white men of privilege and only began to admit women in 1969. From its secret societies to its Whiffenpoofs, men dominated the culture of the
institution in the 1970s, just as they had historically. And if we never spoke of class, status, or distinctions in background, it was because they were so clearly taken for granted.

My class at Yale was 165 students from all over the country. I was attracted to students who were making transitions similar to my own, though few, if any, seemed to be bridging barriers of race, gender, class, geography, and education. I recognized my inexperience and naiveté, but was committed to learning all I could at Yale. The summer before, I had vowed to be like a sponge, soaking up everything that the experience had to offer. I valued what I brought to Yale, but I wanted to absorb what it had as well.

My first-year instructors were highly regarded legal scholars. Guido Calabresi was my torts teacher. Geoffrey Hazard taught our section civil procedure, and Robert Bork, constitutional law. Ellen Peters taught me contracts in a small class of about twenty students. The fact that one of these, Robert Bork, had a national reputation in politics as well left no impression. What mattered to me and most of my classmates was that they were known to be leaders in their field and that they were very much in charge of the classroom and of our learning.

At the urging of some of my classmates, I ran for first-year class representative. Surprisingly, I won. This was probably the first and last political office I would ever hold. A strike by Yale custodians and workers in the fall of 1977 left the campus mostly abandoned by students in the evenings. I had made friends with some of the workers who went on strike. Many of them were black and southern. And for a variety of reasons I identified with them much more easily than I did with my professors. They seemed to identify with the black students as well. To show support of the strike, the students agreed to avoid using the Sterling Law Building after classes. We did little else and perhaps there was little else we could do. It was a minor inconvenience for us compared to the workers, whose livelihood was being threatened. This was perhaps the first time that I felt the conflict of being a part of an entity charged with oppression based on class. I had never been so close to the inside before. Clearly, the people with whom I could most readily identify were being
hurt. But being on the inside did not give me the power to stop that. Eventually, the strike ended, but for the most part, I never resolved my feelings.

Making friends came surprisingly easy for me in law school. I was so shy that I could hardly look people in the eye, but I still had the habit of smiling whenever I spoke to anyone. Perhaps this helped my classmates feel at ease with me. Despite that, the law school experience was difficult for me psychologically. Legal training, with its focus on “objective analysis,” created a dissonance in me that I did not resolve until I started teaching law myself. When I started teaching, I was able to fully explore the analysis rather than simply learn to identify and respond to it. It was then that I realized that what had been proposed as objective was in fact fraught with perspective—the perspective of those who made up the analysis—one that I did not often share. But in law school, rather than question the analysis, I questioned myself. I felt some insecurity, not because of my race or gender, but because my closest friends at the law school all had undergraduate degrees from Princeton, Brown, or Stanford while I had a degree from Oklahoma State University, an “aggie college.” And many had had the benefit of travel and culture that were well beyond my means. None of my friends at Yale ever encouraged these insecurities or pointed out the differences, but when it came to hiring for summer jobs, I knew that I was at a distinct disadvantage.

The famous New England fall foliage came early in my first semester. And just as quickly and unexpectedly followed my first bout of severe homesickness. Once again and far earlier than I was accustomed, it was bitter cold. I missed my family, and with the change in the weather, I even began to long for Oklahoma. I had cried when I said good-bye to my sister JoAnn, heaving sobs that lasted well into Kansas, driving north from Tulsa. I consoled myself by calling JoAnn or my mother. Of course I cried again when I got my telephone bill. My family in Oklahoma was experiencing severe stress. Shortly after I began the fall semester, two of my aunts, my mother’s sisters, died within hours of each other, one in Arkansas and one in Missouri. I could not afford to travel home to be with my family and attend the funerals. But I wrote to my mother
regularly, and she faithfully wrote to me, sometimes twice a week. By the end of the spring semester, I had endured rigorous academic challenges, inevitable second-guessing about my career choice, trying personal circumstances, and one of the harshest winters in the history of Connecticut.

My academic experiences during the second and third years of law school were much more enjoyable. I began to develop a greater sense of what the study of law was about. By the third year I even began to regard the law school environment as intellectually nurturing, not simply challenging. I adjusted to being away from my home and family. I grew socially and personally, becoming less bashful and reserved.

By the end of my last semester at Yale, I had decided to work in Washington, D.C. Though I had an interest in civil rights, I chose to go into a law firm that represented corporate interests, a decision based mostly on financial considerations. I had accumulated considerable debt from college and law school. Moreover, I looked forward to being financially secure myself and being able to offer my parents some of the things they otherwise could not afford. With school behind me, only the bar examination stood between me and the dream of practicing law. Like most of my classmates, I became obsessed with passing. I spent mornings in a review course, afternoons outlining that day’s lecture, and evenings studying the next day’s material. The sixth week of the course seemed like an eternity. And as the date of the exam approached, I grew more and more anxious and so filled with information and mnemonic devices for recalling it that I thought I might burst.

I moved to Washington in July 1980 just a few days before the two-day examination. Tuesday, July 29, could not come quickly enough. The fact that the following day was my birthday was of little importance. The only important thing about July 30, 1980, was that it would be the last day of the bar examination. On the morning before the examination I was too excited to eat, managing only a few bites. As I sat through the timed segments of the examination, years’ worth of information poured onto the pages and out of my head, forever. By the afternoon of the first day, my hands were starting to cramp from writing and tension. It did
not help that everyone around me was as uptight as I. That only egged me on. One student walked out and turned in his exam in the middle of the afternoon, apparently giving up. Another left the auditorium-sized classroom and paced back and forth in front of the door for minutes. At the end of the second day, I knew that my endurance was spent and I could take no more. But that didn’t matter, as it was over.

I left the room having no sense of whether I had passed or failed. No matter, I told myself, the exam is offered twice every year. I’d take it until I did pass. Each day of the months that followed I thought of it. Then, in November, only a few days before Thanksgiving holiday, the results were published. My name was on the list of those who had passed. But even in all our celebration, the most that I could feel was relief.

I had a circle of friends in place, friends from law school who had also chosen to locate in D.C. These were individuals with whom I developed some of my closest relationships ever, a closeness that still remains. Some took government positions; others went into private practice. My classmate Susan Hoerchner, who moved to Washington in the summer of 1980 to take a job at the National Labor Relations Board, became my confidante, one of the few people I would later tell about my experiences as assistant to Clarence Thomas. Kim Taylor, another classmate, initially chose a Washington law firm but then went to the public defender’s office, eventually becoming its director. Sonia Jarvis would come to Washington in 1981 after her clerkship, and for a time we shared a two-story row house on Capitol Hill.

By late fall, Washington was bustling with speculation about the coming change of administration. The Reagan administration would certainly bring new policies that would affect the practice of law in Washington, D.C. I had only voted for one president in my life, Jimmy Carter in 1976. That was the first election in which eighteen-year-olds were allowed to vote. I voted for Carter not so much for his political philosophy, but because he represented a kind of caring and concern about the people of the country that I found alluring. At that point, I had no developed political ideology. I had registered as a Democrat because Democratic candidates appealed to my sense of fairness. Most people in
Oklahoma were Democrats and in some ways mine was a default registration. It never really occurred to me to register Republican.

By November of 1980, too concerned about work and passing the bar examination, I had failed to register to vote in Washington, D.C. By the time election day approached, all of the polls favored Ronald Reagan, whom I mistrusted. The rhetoric he spun struck me as class-divisive. Even though I was enjoying some success having graduated from law school, I could not help but think that many people, family members and friends, who had not would bear much of the economic burden if Reagan was true to his word. Nevertheless, I could not believe that he would be. The events in Iran in the winter of 1979 had taught me that no politician could be. Matters out of their control, like the kidnapping and hostage of Americans in Tehran, ruled much more than any policy they might propose. Ronald Reagan had to be just another politician promising changes that could not come to pass. I had friends who would work in the Reagan administration; I had friends who opposed Reagan. So, with a mixture of apathy and cynicism, I waited to see what would happen.

L
ike most of my classmates, I welcomed the end of law school. As is often the case, however, my first work experience was not the “dream job” a Yale degree promised. Wald, Harkrader and Ross was a medium-size, relatively young Washington law firm. Gilbert Hardy, a Yale Law School graduate I’d met in New Haven, encouraged me to come to the firm as a summer associate in 1979. Gil had visited the campus in 1978 and recruited black law students to come to Washington and particularly to his firm. He believed very much in the relaxed, egalitarian philosophy of the firm, and soon after talking to him I began to believe in it too.

In the spring of 1980 I accepted the firm’s offer to come on as a permanent hire. My class of new associates included seven women and one man, all from East Coast schools. We got along well with each other and with our colleagues and there was little of the competitive tension that many of my friends at other firms complained about. Though I was by no means rich, my salary allowed me to rent a one-bedroom apartment in a neighborhood near my job, to go out from time to time with friends, and to send an occasional gift to my parents. I felt comfortable with the firm’s atmosphere and expectations.

In 1980 Wald’s business was growing, and there was plenty of “quality work” to go around. Our offices were in the heart of the business district, just a few blocks away from Dupont Circle, a major transfer point
for the city’s new subway system. Many days I walked to work from my apartment in Adams-Morgan located about twenty blocks from my job. On my route to work, the characteristic Washington, D.C., brownstones of the residential neighborhood turned into the restaurants and shops just north of the Circle and finally into the modern glass and concrete buildings of the business district. Wald was housed in a modern red brick building with huge picture windows facing onto Eighteenth and M Streets in the city’s northwest quadrant.