An American Story (35 page)

It all came together the day I happened upon a profile of Thurgood Marshall in
Washingtonian Magazine.
I bolted upright in my chair.

That man changed America and he did it with a J.D., the degree that highly verbal but amorphously talented people get when they don't know what else do with themselves. I had to have one, too.

I had no intention of practicing law. To me, the law will always be State Farm forcing me to pay for an accident that destroyed my property and injured me even though they admitted it wasn't my fault. It will always be Chrysler laughing at me secure in the knowledge that the law would do their dirty work for them. The law was the official blessing on my relatives' summary dismissals and evictions. The law made my rapist play volleyball for two months instead of punishing him. But that's precisely why the powerless need to learn how to wield the law, to protect themselves from the powerful who create and control it to protect their own interests. The very idea of practicing law left me cold. But a J.D.? That idea warmed me. The law persecutes the poor but education saves them; a J.D. I didn't intend to directly use was the perfect antidote to the persecution. I'd been around enough to know that those initials behind my name were all I'd need to be deemed officially capable of any endeavor I undertook.

Pragmatically, I also realized that if I got a doctorate, I could teach but I couldn't write a contract or sue an oppressor. But if I got a J.D., I could teach, I could write a contract, I could sue anybody who harassed me. For better or worse, attorneys can do anything in America. I could run a corporation, a nonprofit, a hospital. I could run for office or I could run a university. I could defend the falsely accused or prosecute the predators. I didn't understand how the legal profession worked then, so I also thought I could eliminate the need for a staff lawyer at my foundation if I could write and administer my own contracts, negotiate leases, incorporate nonprofits, and the like. Thankfully, I didn't understand enough then to know that it would take many years of practice before I could function as my own attorney.

With blissful ignorance, I looked at that photo of Marshall and heard the same voice I'd heard in basic training. This is it, it said. Attorney.

I never had another moment of doubt. I knew I didn't want to be a lawyer but that I had to go to law school. I was confident that, until I was ready to open my own organization, some opportunity to work for the betterment of the grassroots African-American community while thoroughly enjoying myself would present itself. I stopped reading
The Economist
and started reading
Ms., Essence, Black Enterprise,
and any other periodical, article, or book having to do with the forward movement of striving women and blacks. My international focus dissipated entirely.

——

Ironically, though it was my idea to attend law school, I had to be prodded to apply to the Ivy League. Erik, the Princeton-educated son of privilege, demanded to know why I was applying to Tulane and Emory but not the Ivy League. I had no reply. In the silence, I remembered that when he and I had first met in Ankara, I asked him if the language of the Princeton diploma on his office wall was Spanish. It was Latin. We were worlds apart.

For all my raised consciousness and hard-earned sense of wide possibility, the Ivy League had never crossed my mind. I'd thought myself bold and freethinking for applying to private law schools, but Yale, Harvard? Even when I was contemplating a doctorate, the University of Missouri at St. Louis was the only school I considered. I could only hold one personal paradigm shift in my head at a time—Ph.D.'s and J.D.'s were holy grails. Ivy League Ph.D.'s and J.D.'s? It made my head hurt to think about it. Self-doubting and neurotic to the end, I applied to eleven schools.

Accepting admission to Harvard Law School was my first consciously political act. It was the first and only time I ever benefited from affirmative action. Harvard routinely turns away students with perfect LSATs; after two weeks of evenings studying at my kitchen table (I was still on active duty), I ranked in the 81st percentile (i.e., only 19 percent scored higher). I had tested early to give myself enough time to readjust my strategy if necessary. Having scored so “low,” I was planning to take a prep course when Erik stepped in again.

He cranked up that privileged-white-boy network they always deny the existence of and we made the crass calculation that, with the rest of my record, I would be admitted just about everywhere as is without troubling myself with a prep course, as do so many of Ivy League admittees. I thought long and hard about taking the course and raising my score simply on principle, but in the end decided to coast on affirmative action. As a younger woman, I would have relished besting the LSAT, if only so I could make whites eat crow whenever affirmative action came up. In my thirties, I'd learned to conserve my energy. It was there for me to take advantage of, so I did. I took the easy way. In my case, it's definitely true that affirmative action allowed me to avoid working my hardest.

I remain ambivalent about affirmative action, though. I had never benefited from it before because my record was outstanding, yet I was always thought to have done so. That used to infuriate me until I realized a few things. First, that it only infuriated me so because I craved white approval. Second, that whites seem to have no trouble living with the knowledge that minorities believe them to be the historic and continuing beneficiaries of built-in affirmative action; if they can shrug it off, so can I. Third, whites will believe you needed affirmative action to best them even when they can see you outperforming them. Affirmative action supporters are often among the most patronizing and dismissive. Too many whites need to believe all blacks are innately inferior and will do so despite the evidence of their own eyes. Now, having accepted that you can rarely change people's hearts and minds, only how you allow them to treat you, I don't care what white people, qua white people, think.

I'm still ambivalent about affirmative action, though, because I believe in the merit system. Or I would if it actually existed. Merit is not what determines who gets what, elite protestations to the contrary. As well, we have no way of gauging the merit of the marginalized. Nor do I accept that a white kid with perfect LSATs and no other accomplishment is more qualified. While I'll admit I got into Harvard through a loophole, I would never have gone had I thought myself unqualified; test scores can't possibly tell a person's whole story. I had no fear of Harvard or of those with higher LSATs. Qualified respect, but no fear. I had no qualms about facing them in a courtroom, a boardroom, or the op-ed page. Non–Ivy League lawyers beat the pants off those prepsters every day in court, every day within their own law firms. Your LSAT score won't help you during final argument.

As much as anything else, though, it maddened me that the debate focused on the interests of the black bourgeoisie; by the time they are applying for college and graduate school, the die has long been cast for the vast majority of blacks. They're destined for mailrooms, french-fry vats, and the backseats of squad cars, not Ivy-covered walls and spring-break ski trips. The genius of the black bourgeoisie is its ability to pass its interests off as the interests of all blacks. The focus should be at the other end, on primary education for those minorities who don't live in the suburbs, attend private schools, or have mentors guiding them to the mainstream. I saw little real difference between the well-off blacks demanding help getting into Harvard and the whites trying to keep it all to themselves by keeping everybody else poorly educated and self-hating. If it's got to be “us” against “them,” I'm going to make sure my team wins.

Through my studies and ruminations, it had become clear to me that the way out and up for blacks was education and entrepreneurship. Conservative and pessimistic at my core, I had no faith in government-based solutions, if only because governments change. Hard work, to my peasant mind, is the only thing that can be counted upon to work. Better for us to take the reins of our destiny in our own hands and alter our relationship to the status quo fundamentally rather than at the margins with welfare, sporadic job-training initiatives, affirmative action, and the like.

I knew that it was partially the loss of hands-on neighborhood access to blacks who had made it that was responsible for conditions there. It appears to be impossible for most of those outside the inner city to understand how alienated many of its denizens feel from the mainstream, but it's all too true. Having a well-educated, well-traveled Ivy League grad living and running a neighborhood-based remedial education and entrepreneurial development center two doors down would make it that much easier for them to believe that they too could do big things. When I was reassigned as an officer, I made it a point to leave my office door open so all the enlisted blacks who “happened” by as word spread could get a good look. Black officers were still few, so I knew what they were thinking as they checked me over from head to toe like a new breed of black person
—Maybe, just maybe, I could do that too.
Black pilot friends told me that invariably when enlisted blacks on the flight line spied their dark faces at the controls of a fighter jet, the troops would stand straighter, salute more smartly, make a point of going the extra mile. Real role models with concrete accomplishments—and not just pampered black elites working their connections to get ahead—give black people real hope.

Also, Harvard would allow me to confront head-on the negativity and defeatism too many of us rely on to excuse our mistakes and our apathy. Only someone like me could look them in the eye and call “Bullshit” to their protestations that “the man” won't let you get ahead. What they needed to realize was that the man can't stop you from getting ahead, not if you're determined. Mae Jemison, the black astronaut, would always seem larger than life when seen from a TV screen. If they saw her down the block mowing her lawn and schlepping groceries in between interviews, people would find it easier to believe that they could do what she had done.

Also, I knew that having a Harvard J.D. would give me a penis. A white one. Harvard Law School would make me an honorary white man for the first ten minutes of a business meeting, long enough for me to demonstrate my mettle. Without that, a black working-class female with night school degrees would have a much more difficult time building bridges between the government, educational and financial communities, and the black community. No one knew better than me that getting ahead was as much about having the right connections and the proper items on your résumé as anything else. I knew that Harvard turns heads and raises appreciative eyebrows.

Finally, I just plain wanted it. I needed to best Harvard. Though it would have chewed me up as an eighteen-year-old—because it would have—I had to experience that which had so terrified me as a young person.

In the end, I was hounded by law schools. I was flooded with calls, letters, scholarship offers, and personal attention. This time, I had lively conversations with all comers and was amused when they sicced their Black Law Students' Association presidents on me. I was admitted everywhere but Stanford and terminally wait-listed at Yale.

Somewhere, my father was laughing at the thought of me in law school, let alone Harvard. Not at me but with me, because I thought it was pretty damned funny, too.

——

Next, I went looking for scholarships. I buried myself in the stacks at the public library and applied for about a hundred and fifty different awards. Months later, I got a phone call from the Earl Warren Scholarship office administered through the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund. Valhalla, for me, having been established and directed for so long by Thurgood Marshall himself. I'd applied for their biggest award, $1,500 (a year at HLS costs about $30,000). They were calling to find out if I'd compete for a new $30,000 award they'd just established (this was only its second offering) through a joint venture with Shearman & Sterling, a major New York law firm. It had set aside its winnings from a pro bono lawsuit. Soon, I took my first trip to Manhattan for the competition. I came home a winner.

Just like at OTS, I pared my possessions down to the indispensable. Part of my dilemma had been figuring out how to hold on to all my identity-buttressing possessions while making such a profound lifestyle change. I had to accept, though, that I couldn't. It all had to go because I couldn't take anything with me. I couldn't afford to maintain anything, not if I was to be autonomous. Autonomy meant responsibility. It meant minimalism.

I paid off my mother's car, sold mine, and gave her everything we didn't sell, donate, or pitch from our cushy trilevel Lorton, Virginia, town house. I paid off my few bills and emptied my bank accounts, my IRA, even the savings bonds I'd bought as a green airman. My life looked like the Oregon Trail, former treasures jettisoned at every turn. I never missed any of it. Walking away from all my possessions was a heady experience—I felt so free I sang as I made my last trip from the homeless shelter I gave my library to. I was astounded remembering how hard I'd schemed to hold on to all those . . . those things when it was so clear that everything I really needed was in my head and in my heart.

Mama had decided to move to warm Charlotte, North Carolina, where my oldest sister and her family live. Born to be best friends, Erik and I broke up, then moved in together as roommates in Arlington, Virginia. For the first time since I was sixteen, I didn't have even one job, wasn't taking even one class.

PARTY PEOPLE

I was discharged in early 1992. While I waited for the next adventure to begin, I cast about for a way to get my feet wet in activism. I couldn't afford not to work but I was determined not to get just some job. When a DNC fund-raiser called to hit us up for a donation, Erik talked me up to the caller, stressing my admission to Harvard Law School. Just as I'd gambled, Harvard opened doors before I ever arrived on campus. Soon, I was meeting with the volunteer coordinator. You have to have connections to get a job there, so I jumped at the chance to stuff envelopes and field constituent calls without pay.