Speaking Truth to Power (7 page)

In the meantime, the farmwork, which during winter consisted mostly of feeding the cattle and pigs, continued. During the winter of 1967 the work fell on Ray and my mother. This was a precursor for the following winter. That year, with my father ill again and Ray away at school, the chore of feeding over a hundred head of cattle fell on my mother, JoAnn, and me. My mother was the muscle of the operation weighing 130 pounds. At ages fifteen and eleven, neither JoAnn nor I weighed more than 90 pounds. The winter of 1967 was cold and dismal. Often my body quivered—the response of a frightened adolescent who had not yet learned to express such an intense fear of loss.

Everything in my life and in the world seemed completely upended
and uncontrollable. I was eleven years old and for the first time ever I was more frightened by the world than I was intrigued by it. Quietly, I had always soaked up life’s experiences. I loved schoolwork; even test taking. In the evening when my chores were completed and before I did my homework, I watched the national news with intense interest. I even enjoyed some, but admittedly not all, of the rigors of farmwork. Now, however, I wanted to retreat.

My life with my family had been more than just the farmwork. My sisters and brothers were my best friends. I rode the bicycle I shared with JoAnn. I played basketball on a dirt court with Ray. On Saturdays when my parents went to town for the family groceries and left us at home, I listened to the 45s that John played for us while Ray and Carlene danced. In the springtime Jo Ann and I picked blackberries along the roadsides. In the fall we fished the mud holes together for crawdads—one of JoAnn’s favorite activities. Even on the farm there were always sounds and sights that were pleasant, bright, and exciting—the greens of the spring peas, the croaking of the tree frogs, the glimmer of the fireflies that we called lightning bugs.

Yet in 1967 and 1968 everything in the bright world of sunshine, green grass, and purple and yellow flowers appeared to be covered with a gray film. Gone was the brother who entertained us with his love of music, the one who went streaming through our house with its seven-foot ceilings playing an imaginary game of basketball. John was gone—first to an air force base in San Antonio, then to Germany, mercifully not Vietnam, where one of his friends from high school had already died. I wrote him, but the letters he sent home could not take the place of his presence or give any assurance that he was safe from the war.

All around me people seemed to speak in hushed tones perhaps due to the fact that my father needed rest and quiet. I had never been a noisy child but I was even more quiet now, believing that it was the only way to save my father’s life. The strain hit us all. My mother was tired and not altogether healed. Each of us carried with us the stress of the injuries and recovery period. Remnants of the stresses remained for months. We
could have each retreated into our own hurt, and left alone, perhaps I would have. However, our circumstances did not allow it. We were so accustomed to functioning as a unit that we continued, even in our healing, to do so. Work, church, and school continued. In particular, farmwork had to be done regardless of sickness or death. We continued to attend church. Our neighbors and our community expected it. And Ray, JoAnn, and I continued with school. Our parents’ misfortune and the death of our aunt were no excuse for irresponsibility.

B
y 1968 my world and the world outside my home and family were changing dramatically. The county school board closed Eram as integration began to happen throughout the school system. I would transfer to Morris for junior high school. Even aside from the integration, going to school in Morris represented major change in my early life. Morris was a town—albeit a small town—with paved streets. It had a bank, a feed store, a hardware store, and a drugstore where, if I were lucky, I could buy ice cream while my mother shopped for groceries at Gale’s Market. Eram was just a school, standing alone, surrounded by fields of hay.

Though Ray started at the segregated Grayson High School, by 1967 he was attending the newly integrated Morris High School, along with JoAnn. Ray’s negative experiences with integration included having to be escorted out of Glenpool, Oklahoma, by local police because the fans there objected to his playing on the Morris High School football team. Amid the racist taunts and jeers his bus was led out of town after his team had won the game.

In my own transfer to Morris, I saw new opportunities—opportunities that were never realized. What I did realize was the signficance of race. My first experience with the tensions of integration occurred in Morris, which, despite the integration of its schools, remained an all-white town. Though not a “sundown” town in the purest sense, no blacks resided in Morris. We bought our groceries there, and went to the
post office there, but we did not
live
there. Even as late as 1983, when a black family started building a home on the outskirts of town, arsonists destroyed it before it could be completed.

But even though the social structure set very real lines of demarcation between blacks and whites, my parents insulated us from extreme forms of racism. I often wonder at how they were able to do so, in a society not unlike the Deep South, where so much racial division still remained. By the time I was born my parents had many years, even generations, of experience living and raising children in a segregated society.

Despite the early Supreme Court challenges to Oklahoma’s racial separatism and despite the fact that the very first lunch counter sit-in took place in Oklahoma City in 1962, much of the civil unrest experienced in the South escaped Oklahoma. Those of us living in rural areas of Oklahoma watched the movement on television and read about it in the newspapers. As a family we watched and waited in silence, though each member, I suspect, wondered how our lives would be changed by what we saw and heard about. I was at home when the announcement of the assassinations came over the airwaves. In April 1968, as we ate our dinner on a balmy evening, reports of Dr. Martin Luther King’s death came on the nightly news. My father spoke of it in knowing terms. It was “predictable,” he declared, given the intense hatred King’s denouncement of segregation had brought. My mother agreed.

We did not customarily talk of politics at home, and though this tragic event provided a rare opportunity, we did not speak of politics then, either. Nor did we speak of the assassination at all the following day at school. In June, with Ray, I watched the news films of the shooting of Robert Kennedy. Still no discussion from my parents of the politics of our times—the times that would change their children’s future. The times were so different than those my parents had known that they knew no language in which to speak about them. My parents’ lives were more like their own parents’ than the lives of their children. Uncertain of the relevance of their observations, they mostly kept quiet. We never discussed why the family never ate at the lunch counter in Newberry’s during our trips to Okmulgee but instead ate our Dairy Queen hamburgers
in the car. Or why the rural black folks gathered and shopped at Norman’s Grocery Store rather than the larger and newer Neal’s, where the whites gathered and shopped. Or why black people were always interred by Dyer’s, Ragsdale’s, or Brown’s funeral homes and never one of the white-owned mortuaries, whose names even today I’m not aware of. The civil rights movement was a remote and abstract experience. In Oklahoma we certainly identified with its goal, but its activities never reached the rural areas except over the television.

There were few incidents of physical resistance to the integration at Morris in my experience. When I arrived there as an eighth grader, Ray and the five other black students in his class had paved the way. Though the black boys had opportunities to mainstream in the high school culture in sports, the black girls’ access to the fields of distinction in school culture—cheerleading and homecoming activity—remained limited. None of the black girls were encouraged to participate on the girls’ basketball team, which in Morris had a history of state championships. For me it was all the same. I was not athletic, nor did I think myself beautiful in the homecoming queen way. I had a pleasant round face that from age seven was adorned with glasses thick enough to correct my nearsightedness, and that did not seem to change much with age. I looked and indeed was very bookish. I remained that way during high school and college.

Much of the classwork came easy, the rest I studied so intensely at times that my father worried. The time that I spent talking to my friend Pocahontas Barnett on our recently acquired telephone came only after I had completed my homework. Being bookish paid off, however, as I graduated at the top of my high school class, an honor that had been denied JoAnn. When she graduated from Morris High School three years earlier, she was told that even though her grades technically put her at the top of the class, the fact that she had transferred into the Morris system in the middle of the freshman year made her ineligible to be valedictorian. That honor went instead to her friend Clara Ivy, who, since elementary school, had been used to the top spot in her classes at Morris. JoAnn was made salutatorian. JoAnn, who even by then had
developed a pretty good temper, did not complain, though she must have been hurt deeply. When I graduated, none of my classmates seemed surprised or disturbed that I was first in the class, least of all the salutatorian that year, my friend Susie Clark. And next year Susie and I went off to college at Oklahoma State University, in Stillwater, together.

I always knew that I would go to college, though only a few of my classmates from high school would. As you can imagine in a family of our size, a good amount of energy was funneled to me, the youngest child. And along with the energy came an equivalent amount of expectation. Fortunately for me, I enjoyed the experience of being taught and learning from my family. My sister Joyce still teases me about reading over and over again the first book I ever owned. She claims she still remembers all of the lines in
Green Eggs and Ham!
This is a testament to her patience with me.

Fortunately, I grew up during a time when social forces were such that I might have a better opportunity to realize my family’s and my own expectations. In ways small and large, from school lunch programs to student grants and loans, they enhanced my opportunities for a better life than the one enjoyed by my parents and grandparents. I no doubt have benefited from affirmative action programs, which looked at my race, gender, and background and determined whether I would be admitted. But I am not ashamed of this fact, nor do I apologize for it. Such programs provided me with the opportunity to prove myself, no more, no less. After admission, my success or failure would be determined by my efforts. I do not consider myself either more or less worthy than my colleagues in the same programs.

M
y parents raised their children to love and leave home because they knew they had no other chance there at a better life. And in just the same order they’d been born, every two years, almost like clockwork, each of my brothers and sisters left home for school or to enter the military. There were few employment opportunities to keep us home. Okmulgee County had, at the time of my birth, a population of approximately
40,000, of which about 7,000 were black. The primary sources of jobs were related to agriculture and were relatively limited. The peanut plant located in Okmulgee, the seat of Okmulgee County, served as the station where most of the local farmers brought their crops for weighing and processing. It provided seasonal work for a few. Work that was dirty and dangerous. Prior to the time of OSHA regulations, several accidents occurred at the plant, one of which, involving the only son in a neighboring family, was fatal. The entire community grieved. As each offered the family condolences, many questioned whether it might have been prevented.

The other notable industry was the slaughterhouse, the success of which was linked to the fact that many of the local residents raised their own beef and pork for food. During the brief period between the time that home curing became unpopular and supermarkets with abundant supplies of meat became popular and accessible, the slaughterhouse prospered. Even the glass jars produced at the local glass plant are, to me, associated with the rural lifestyle. Each rural household of which I was aware used countless numbers of fruit jars from July to September to put up the summer’s fruits and vegetables, jellies and jams. Once a flourishing industry and source of jobs, each year the plant employed fewer and fewer individuals. In 1994 the plant closed.

By the economic, social, and cultural standards of most Americans, the family of Albert and Erma Hill was poor. Yet I never knew it, for our lives were rich with family, friends, God, and nature. Even now, as I look back, I do not remember poverty, because we lacked the kinds of hopelessness and despair that choke many of the poor today. As I think of the family that entered the hearing in the Russell Senate Office Building on October 11, 1991, I see not only those present but those who came before us as well. Having lived through our struggles together in a life that was anything but easy, we expected adversity, and we expected to withstand it.

F
or months after accepting the admission to Yale and sending in my deposit, I was 110 pounds of nervous energy. I don’t recall that my knees shook, but I remember lying awake wide-eyed many nights during the spring of 1977, wondering what it might be like.

In the summer of 1977, just before my twenty-first birthday, I traveled to Connecticut in preparation for my first semester at Yale Law School. I wanted to adjust to living in Connecticut before my classes started. I approached my first year of law school with the mingled anticipation and apprehension of a child about to receive her first bike. I had first become interested in law at age fifteen when I read in JoAnn’s sorority magazine that two of the women active in politics and the civil rights movement, Yvonne Burke and Patricia Harris, were lawyers. The images of the marchers and protesters influenced me as well. They were people who knew how cruel the law could be but believed so much in it that they were willing to die for changes in it. The civil rights movement and the people, lawyers and nonlawyers, in it inspired my belief in the law. My family and family friends had instilled in me a belief that I could actually achieve a law school education. But even at age twenty, as I readied myself for school, I had known only one lawyer personally. Nor had I ever spent more than two weeks outside the state of Oklahoma or crossed its border more than twice. For sixteen years of my life, I had not ventured more than 120 miles from our farm, and life in Stillwater during
college was almost an extension of my life on the farm. But now the distance offered by Yale was a daunting prospect.