An American Story (41 page)

The secretary assigned to me was so hostile, so lazy, and such a clock watcher, I eventually stopped asking her to do anything but my diaries (lawyers track their time in six-minute increments—we scribble in diaries all day, making sure to account for every billable nanosecond). When I asked her to show me the program that my diary entries had to go into, she had enough pride left to be embarrassed. She snatched it from me: “I'll do it!” It was the only task she performed for me all summer. I once heard her bleat to a caller, “Aw! Take a message? Can't you just call her back?”

Doing my own administrative work was simpler than constantly riding herd on her. What little she did, she did sloppily and usually incorrectly; I couldn't let my name go out on it. The first few weeks, before I gave up, I'd watch her eyes go angrily narrow as I gave her some instruction—she wanted to spit in my eye, it was quite obvious. She was bitter, but she was also scared. She needed the job but she expected to be dissed (“Who the hell is this Little Miss Harvard?” I heard her sniff on the phone to someone my first morning there). She was black; I had thought that might help. Instead, I think it made her dislike me more.

Is this what will happen to that hardworking girl from the DNC cafeteria? I used to wonder.

Eventually, she thawed toward me somewhat—smiling when our paths crossed, asking a few questions about my life—but I never did toward her. I had no respect for her. She only started liking me because I didn't require her to do her job. She was rarely even at her desk. So she gave me a start the day I looked up to see her in my doorway. I had only a few days left.

Blunt and nervous, she demanded to know what sort of evaluation I was going to give her.

She was holding the form clenched in her fist. Her face looked like it had the first few weeks, when she thought I might abuse her or try to make her work, both prospects being equally unpleasant.

I asked her, “Do you realize that this is the only thing you took the initiative to do this entire summer?”

She drew herself up with a hiss.

“Aint nobody begging you for nothing. Say whatever you want,” she spat, and left.

I never saw her again. I saw her coat appear and disappear. Noticed that her computer was off when it had been on, and vice versa. I heard her slip into her chair, talk on the phone, disappear again. But I never saw her.

My last day, I left the signed but otherwise blank form on her desk with a Post-it that said, “You fill it in, then you will have accomplished
two
things.”

I was dreading a repeat performance of the class struggle at the San Francisco office. As usual, I had a different problem that I would never have expected.

The San Francisco office was small, fewer than twenty lawyers and perhaps thirty admin staff. There were only four or five summer associates.

My first day, the hall outside my office was dead. But every day the rest of that week, the foot traffic was downright distracting. Eventually, I noticed that I was seeing only black faces. Then I realized that I was seeing the same black faces over and over again. The fifth time I saw a black woman with a head full of wild, unprocessed hair turn away just as I looked up, I called out, “Enough already. Get in here.”

One of the admin staff shuffled in, chuckling ruefully.

She spent the next half hour explaining to me how to get my hair like hers. I'd let my hair go natural in 1992 without any idea of what was going to grow out of my scalp. Two years later, I still had not quite mastered its intricacies; she was my black hair consultant.

That day, I had lunch at one of San Francisco's trendiest, most expensive restaurants. The next, I was eating from a plastic tray at a cafeteria with five black women from the word-processing pool.

“We just had to see which kind you were,” one teased in response to my jokes about being stalked.

“Hmmm, I'm not sure what you mean. Which kind of what?” I said, wide-eyed with fake innocence. “Oh, which department? Hi, Debra Dickerson, Mergers and Acquisitions,” I deadpanned, holding out my hand for a shake.

They laughed. I did too, but I knew this was shaky ground. Whose side was I on? Because I knew no one can possibly be on both. I couldn't bring myself not to associate with them (I
wanted
to associate with them, they were fun and down-to-earth), but I'd worked too hard to deny myself the perks of my newfound position—like ruining some word processor's evening with extra work at the last minute if that's what I decided was required. I listened while they filled me in on office politics, often belittling partners or associates I liked. I was walking a tightrope. I could see it stretching out before me.

As we were coming back from one of these lunches one day, a partner passed our group. He looked so confused, I could almost hear his thoughts: What is a summer associate, a
lawyer,
doing with typists? What's wrong with this picture?

So be it, I thought. If he wants to hold it against me, if my work suddenly seems less competent to him, I'll move on. Nobody tells me with whom I can socialize.

He stopped by my office just a few hours later. He was delighted by “this turn of events.” He was happy to see the “rapport” I had with the “staff.” Diplomatically, he explained that there'd been a few “misunderstandings” in the past and he thought it was great to have me to run interference.

Warning bells were clanging.

One of the women who was both the funniest and the most militant of the typists had brought a grievance meeting to a halt recently to brandish a
Lawyers Weekly
article trumpeting the firm's unprecedented profits. She'd read aloud the part about the partners' take and demanded to know what percentage of those millions the staff was going to get. Gleefully, the typists had told me about it. Reportedly this partner had been furious, telling her she was out of line for inquiring into things that were none of her business.

I knew what sort of “misunderstandings” he meant and I did not want to be the one sent to “explain things” to the “staff.” I had no one to blame but myself for thinking I could straddle the line. What would happen when one of my lunch buddies thought they could slack off on some work for me? What would happen if one of them made a huge mistake? Was I willing to share more of the profit with them? Decision-making?

I was very worried about my future in a world so starkly divided between haves and have-nots because I was pretty sure I would identify with the haves. I'd encourage the have-nots to do the work and join us in the penthouse, but until then . . .

Fortunately for me, there were no barricades to man that summer, no cake to offer the starving instead of bread. I got away with it, that high-wire act I had naively created. I never had to put my money where my mouth was and I knew I had dodged a bullet. I'll respect the nonprofessional staff wherever I am, always, but I will never again pretend to identify with them.

Early one morning, I looked up to find that militant would-be labor organizer standing in my office doorway staring at me.

“Miss Thing? Yes?” I prodded her jokingly, but she just kept staring.

“You look good today,” she said with a strange intensity.

Huh?”

She snapped out of some reverie and blew her nose into a wad of tissues twisted in her hand. She'd been crying.

“I just needed to see you, like this,” and she gestured at the pile of treatises on my desk. “Harvard. Everything.”

I got her to come in and sit down. Then she told me her story.

The night before, she'd picked her husband up from the country club where he caddied.

(Her husband was a
caddie?
A grown man was a caddie, that still happened?)

The sprinklers had been tossing up rainbows as she waited in the car. The sunset had been so beautiful, the landscape so lush, they'd ended up sitting in their car necking.

Her husband had just called. Security patrols had noted them “casing” the country club and fired him. He'd only just managed to talk them out of calling the police. There were no black marks on his record there.

“So, I just needed to see little Miss M&A today,” she laughed between sniffles.

I didn't know what to say, so we just sat there.

“Hey!” I said. “My secretary's white. Want me to call her in and order her around?”

That made her smile. I brought her some coffee, and when she'd collected herself, she made her slow, dignified way back to the word-processing pool.

——

After a summer spent watching working-class black people struggle with real problems, I returned to Harvard to find that my wish hadn't come true and the BLSA membership issue had not resolved itself. I was torn to pieces. I was militant about our right to a place of our own (though I rarely went there), yet I thought it inexcusable to take law school funds without being open to the whole law school. The reactionary forces demanding an open-door vpolicy at BLSA would rather be expelled than find themselves in a majority-black room, yet they had us dead to rights. Worse, I felt sure BLSA would handle the issue poorly.

I was so committed to my column then, anything that stayed on my mind got written about. So I decided not to attend BLSA meetings on the subject. I was enough of a tribalist not to want to give aid and comfort to the enemy on such a core issue. One way or the other we were going to lose, so I decided we should close ranks and go down united.

The membership consulted Professor Charles Ogletree, our official adviser, former National BLSA president and a criminal law specialist. He gave BLSA the bad news: there was no way to keep the policy, so give in gracefully. BLSA held straw polls and emergency meetings while blowing the
Record
off completely, though the editor, Greg Stohr, pestered the president constantly for an interview. Stohr asked me to try to persuade him, a request which I refused. Personally, though, I had decided that BLSA should remain black-only and stop accepting university funds. Failing that, we had no choice as moral beings but to open the membership to all. If BLSA did neither, I was going to resign, via my
Record
column.

If it meant that much to us, we should be willing to give up what was purportedly the best student-organization office space on campus and go off-campus. HLS's wealthy black alums could help us offset the cost and law firms would still shower us with funds and attention. All we needed was a little determination, a little willingness to look beyond our own creature comforts, a little initiative.

But in the end, BLSA caved. Near as I could tell from all the meetings I'd missed, no one made any bones about the fact that, in the end, it was all about the perks of the HLS letterhead.

We stayed on campus and kept Big Daddy's dollars. Once it was decided and announced, I went to a meeting the point of which was to design the new membership rules. Just as I'd suspected, the talk was only of the huge, law-firm-funded BLSA Job Fair, the BLSA study guides reproduced at HLS expense, the resource base of HLS, and how no one was prepared to give that up. I guess there's something to be said for their bare-bones honesty, but a little bit of shame might not have been misplaced just then. Martin wrote his letter from the Birmingham jail, but the best we could do was write a host of onerous restrictions aimed at dissuading white folk from daring to cross BLSA's threshold. It was grandfather clauses all over again. I heard proposals detailing the ridiculously high amount of committee work new members would have to undertake, the lengthy papers they'd have to write, the high percentage of meetings they'd have to attend. Few BLSA members evinced that level of commitment.

How many bubbles in a bar of Ivory soap, nigger?

What amazed me was how open the discussion about running the white folks off was. When I graduated, new members had to sign a McCarthyite loyalty oath, one which I spoke up against at the last BLSA meeting I attended and which I went on record saying I wouldn't sign. Their matter-of-fact selfishness left me breathless; they had no shame. What they did have, however, was vengefulness. That's what the new killer rules were about.

Lots of blacks went about campus after that dramatically haughty, wearing our unearned suffering and racial superiority like an ermine cape. I thought we should have felt shame. Shame for our greed. Shame for our vindictiveness. Shame because when the moment of truth came, we acted just like them. We'd become what we professed to loathe.

——

I felt farther removed from the black liberal bourgeoisie in 1995 than I did in 1992. I'd already had several soul-scares, though, a few moments where my own wonderfulness went to my head and I actually believed that I was better off because I was better.

A Shearman partner had been trying to talk me into joining the firm after graduation and I'd avoided the core issue by focusing on New York's crime. This partner packed more pro bono civil rights work into her litigation docket than some LDF staffers, yet she responded to me like the slumlord who had humiliated me and my friend on his porch.

“Not
that
again! Look, safety is about brains.
I
live in a doorman building.
I
take taxis or a car service, not the subway or buses. I stock up so I don't have to go out at night. Jeez, what do they expect?”

“True,” I said. Then, “Wait a minute! You're a millionaire.”

My head reeled with cognitive dissonance. I'd scared myself so badly I had to sit down and make myself say “People aren't poor and victimized because they're stupid” ten times. Privilege, on the other hand, can make you a moron. It certainly did me a few times.

What I failed to add to the vignette about Mark Gearan giving my job away was the little detail that, back in D.C. just before I left for Boston, I had respectfully told Mark off. He was nonplussed. That angle (my existence) had not occurred to him. Merely grateful that he'd heard me out, I thanked him for listening and turned to go. He called me back and, without apologizing, asked what he could do to make up for it. Unprepared for this turn of events (all I'd wanted was the dignity of acknowledgment), I thought to ask for a chance to do advance work, which had struck me during the campaign as flight-line-like and adrenaline-fueled. He picked up the phone and I left the next day for a week prepping for a Gore campaign swing through Stockton, California. The people on the advance team, who had presumably struggled up through the ranks, had no choice but to accept Gore's campaign manager's specific “request,” this woman from nowhere with no advance-team experience. The team leader watched me like a caged but unfed boa constrictor—not about to piss off someone as important as Mark but furious that I'd been forced on her. I felt like I'd climbed through their windows with a stocking mask on. While I stacked Evian and Gummi Bears in Gore's command-center hotel room, I tried to justify my string-pulling by the work I'd done for Mark and by the fact that I hadn't actually tried to cash in; it had just happened. It almost worked until I began wondering how my “replacement” had justified her own hookup to herself every time I had used my eyes to jab voodoo-doll pins in her.