A Reason to Believe (15 page)

My mom’s life took a very different turn. Soon after Diane and I were married, my mother took ill and could no longer care for herself. After a long stay in the hospital, where the doctors could not determine the cause of her seizures and partial paralysis, she moved into a rehab facility in Chicago. When it seemed that there was no hope she would get better, we moved her in with us.

In some ways, her presence seemed natural for both Diane and me, having grown up in multigenerational households. But this arrangement required many sacrifices. In Brooklyn, my mom saw specialists who gave her medication that helped her regain her mobility, but her spirits suffered horribly, and her emotional decline wore everyone down. She helped when she could, especially when Katherine was born and we could not find a suitable sitter to manage both kids. But over time my mother seemed to resent her dependence on us, and perhaps even my relationship with Diane, who shouldered an even greater burden around the house. I’ll forever be grateful to Diane for accommodating her. My mother did not always make it easy.

My mom lived with us for twenty years, and whatever her physical or emotional state, it was important to me that she always felt part of our family. In the 1990s, for example, when I was the assistant attorney general for civil rights, the
Los Angeles Times
wrote a profile on me and sent a photographer to our home for a family picture. Diane, Sarah, Katherine, and I were on the stairs, ready for the shot, when I noticed my mom sitting alone. I told her to get in the picture.

The photographer said, “No, I just want the family.”

I don’t know if he didn’t want her because of her scarred face or—a more generous interpretation—because he wanted only my immediate family. But it didn’t matter.

“My mom is part of this family,” I said.

I knew how self-conscious she was, but I also understood how proud she was of me, Diane, and the girls, and how important it was for her to be included in this photograph. She came over, sat next to Sarah and Katherine, and smiled.

In the summer of 1993, while my father was visiting, Rhonda and I took a long walk with him and our kids on the Freedom Trail in Boston. It was a hot day, and we stopped for a cool drink and a bite to eat at an open-air restaurant at Faneuil Hall Marketplace. Suddenly the color drained from my father’s face, his speech began to slur, and he collapsed in a seizure. The restaurant summoned an ambulance. The kids were frightened and upset, so I took them home while Rhonda rode with Pat to the hospital. He was diagnosed with leukemia. Not long after, he left New York and returned to his hometown of East Moline, Illinois, to be close to his mother and other family members. I didn’t fully appreciate it then, but he was going home to die. Late that year, we were preparing to go on a cruise, and I got word before we boarded in Miami to call my father. From a pay phone in the Miami airport, I reached him at his hospital, still not fully understanding how grave his condition was. His voice was weak, unlike I had ever known it, but also eerily calm. He said frankly
that he thought the end was near; he did not need me to come but just wanted to say good-bye. I told him that I loved him, and I meant it.

“I’m not quite ready to let go of you yet,” I said.

I meant that, too. It was the last time we spoke.

It was my mother who called us ship to shore on New Year’s Day to say my father had passed away. Her voice cracked. I sat for a long time alone on the deck, staring out at the tropical sea, trying to figure out how I felt. Sad. Regretful. Forgiving. Admiration for his total dedication to his art. Understanding how we muddle along, bumping into circumstance and opportunity and tragedy, but ultimately having faith in the people closest to us.

More than a full decade would pass before my mother became gravely ill with hepatitis and uterine cancer. In a life of many difficult moments and with so many reasons for regret, I believe she deserved all the tenderness and friendship that Diane and I, as well as my sister and her husband, could give her. Despite her often unfair treatment of Diane, in her final year it was frequently Diane who would feed and bathe her and keep her company. At the end, she was in the same nursing home where my grandmother had spent her last days, and she died there in January of 2005 on the day the
Boston Globe
reported that I would be a candidate for governor.

At the reception after my mother’s memorial service, someone asked me what it felt like to be an orphan. Strangely, I felt as though I already knew the emotional
distance that orphans must experience. But I also came to know the moral imperatives that every family confers on every member—to comfort and love, to support and encourage, to bless and forgive. Sometimes the last one is the hardest. It was for me, and I wish I had understood its importance sooner. But there is no statute of limitations on forgiveness. You need only save a place, and because I did, I found reconciliation in good time. That is comfort enough.

My mother did not care much for church. By the end of the week, she was bone tired from work and the weight of her misery. But my grandmother was a child of the South, and for her, church on Sunday was a must. She was an envied soloist for many years in her church and punctuated her days around the house with soulful hymns. Though she also cursed like a sailor, she quoted scripture often. There was no question in her mind that my sister and I would be raised in the church, and she insisted we go every Sunday.

Her means of enforcing this rule did not involve
threats of eternal damnation so much as the promise of a big country breakfast when we came home. In a household where her groceries were strictly segregated from my mother’s and where my sister and I were always hungry, Sunday mornings (like holidays) were occasions for a common feast. And these were big country breakfasts, prepared in the traditions Gram had brought with her from Kentucky—eggs, sausage or scrapple, bacon, grits, homemade biscuits and gravy, fried apples in the fall, sometimes liver and onions. We awoke to the luscious smell of bacon frying. We could not partake, however, until after church. It was a bribe, pure and simple. And it worked.

The Cosmopolitan Community Church was just a block away, on 53rd and Wabash Avenue. It was an unusual black church for its time. The pastor was a woman. Dr. Mary Evans was humble, subdued, and elderly, with dull, limp gray hair and skin so fair she may have been white. The church seemed to be in decline. The pews were hardly ever full except on Easter Sunday. Today there is an updated sanctuary, with modern broadcast and sound systems and a band with an electric bass and drums. But in my childhood, services were held in a cool, dark space with wooden folding seats, a wheezing organ, and, behind the altar, a lighted cross. Services were quiet, even a tad boring, with little of the shouting or theatrics of many black churches. I was baptized there just before I went off to Milton Academy, wrapped in a white sheet, fully
immersed in a big bathtub of warm water that appeared from behind a wine-colored velvet curtain. That was about as close as we came to drama at Cosmopolitan.

What I recall most vividly are the old ladies. They wore dresses whose bright colors had faded or tailored suits in shades of brown or gray that may once have fit. Some wore gloves, yellowed with time. They all wore hats—pillboxes, ovals, broad-brimmed, and those little numbers shaped like military caps or fedoras—with ribbons and pins and plumes. All the jewelry was costumed and dated but worn with pride. The ladies swept into the church with their grandchildren in tow and seated themselves with little ceremony, clutching their frayed King James Bibles, ready to get down to the business of worship. They nodded their approval during the sermon or when student achievements were acknowledged, fanned themselves when it was warm, and glared at fidgeting children.

Old ladies ran the place. When it was time to sing, they chose which hymns would best suit the pastor’s message by humming the tunes until the organist caught on and caught up. The music rose from our pews, and the songs themselves—“Amazing Grace,” “The Old Rugged Cross”—were haunting, reverent, and spiritual. At the end of nearly every service, one particular old woman who sat in front would sing “Blessed Assurance” with conviction, white spittle collecting at the corners of her mouth, and the others would join in. People always sang like they
meant it. Their hymns lifted us to a higher plane—the common miracle of every black church I have ever visited. The overall tone was one of peaceful reflection, of true sanctuary. Once there, I inevitably forgot that I just wanted to earn the big breakfast back home.

I watched those old ladies and, more important, experienced them. I knew from overhearing my grandmother’s gossip about the calamity in their own lives, yet I saw them encourage others when they themselves were suffering, when a child of their own was in trouble, when their own husband had lost his job, when their own spirit was in need of renewal. I got hugs when my good grades were announced, even when their own grandchildren had slipped into a gang. Their ability to love selflessly was constant and certain.

I have had so many blessings in my own life, so many improbable gifts, that I am long past questioning whether there is an invisible hand at work in my life. To me, God is real. But my years at Cosmopolitan, and the experience of those old ladies in hats, emphasized that faith is less about what you say you believe and more about how you live. I came to see those old ladies as embodiments of the faith we were taught. They showed me how to welcome and embrace all the people who walked into our church and into our lives, from whatever station. They meant “embrace” literally—a hug, a tactile expression of oneness and support.

Scripture itself is full of poetry about kindness and magnanimity, about the charge to care about and help your fellow man. In the words of the prophet Micah:

These truths are nondenominational. They can be found in the Koran and the Talmud as well as in the Bible. When Gordon Brown, the British prime minister, gave a speech at the Kennedy Library in Boston in 2008 on the strategic importance of foreign aid to poor countries, he described how all the major religions of the world have some version of the Golden Rule, that we treat others as we wish to be treated. Humanity cries out for this in every language on earth. Still, so little of our behavior, public or private, reflects what we all know to be true.

Some of these simple truths of faith traditions are lost in the pomp of organized religion. The pageantry of the Catholic mass or the rituals of Islamic prayer seem sometimes to overtake the message itself. Black ministers and white evangelical preachers, with their capes and dancing and speaking in tongues, sometimes let the showmanship and the fundraising crowd out the lesson of compassion in the text. Islamic “fundamentalists” obscure the gentleness of Islam and turn disenfranchised Middle Easterners into
radicals who blame nonbelievers for all their troubles. It is hardly new in history to have religion used to justify oppression, hatred, or even violence. Still, it is jarring. More than once I have sat in a religious service and wondered what in the world the sermon’s message had to do with the simple command to show justice, mercy, and humility in our lives.

But the old ladies of Cosmopolitan keep calling to me. It is probably thanks to them that social justice has been at the core of my professional life. Social justice is faith in action. Judaism summons a charge to all believers:
“Tikkun olam,”
to repair the world. The notion, as our friend Amy Gorin puts it, has come to mean to live life as if you bear some responsibility for improving the lot of others.
Tikkun olam
is a call to look beyond ourselves and to see our stake in one another. That is the essence of community. We do not have to save the entire world on our own, but we can each repair some small corner of it. Our responsibility is to try. That is what the old ladies of Cosmopolitan were trying to teach me, and their example has led me to some remarkable places.

I thought of law school as a way to express my commitment to social and economic justice—and also to make a buck. When I got there, it seemed that many more of my peers were focused on doing well than on doing good. I found kindred spirits at the Harvard Legal Aid Bureau, the oldest student-run legal aid clinic in the country. There, law students could handle civil cases for clients who
couldn’t afford lawyers. The work suddenly made real the abstractions of book learning.

In one early case, I represented the Jean-Pierres, a poor Haitian family with three small children living nearby, in Somerville. They were behind on their rent, the landlord had turned off their heat, and the family was using its oven to warm the house. They were about to be evicted. They were confused and vulnerable, and they needed help. Their English wasn’t very good, my Creole was nonexistent, so we communicated in broken French. Haltingly, I learned about their struggles in Haiti and in Boston, their determination to make it in Massachusetts, their love for their family and America.