Speaking Truth to Power (36 page)

Busy at school, I tried not to think too much of the count and assumed the nomination’s success. But the press members who returned with me to Norman after the hearing were a constant reminder. “Do you have a comment?” they asked, as if talking to a politician who was about to watch a vote on a piece of legislation she had sponsored, rather than the individual whose story was being judged. So skewed was their perspective that I had nothing I wished to share with them. I asked Ovetta Vermillion, who had the uneviable task of fielding their requests throughout the day, to tell them that no comment would be forthcoming.

The more persistent were not satisfied and followed me as I left the law school for home once again, camping across the street in a neighbor’s
yard. Once inside my house, I would pull the shades and try to block out what was happening across the street. I would not allow the invasiveness of television cameras into my home. But no curtains could close out the clamor that the scene in my neighbor’s yard represented. For it was everywhere, inside my head and out. No matter how hard I tried “not to think about it,” my power of concentration met its match, and, like millions of others around the country, my mind focused on the vote. The major television networks carried the vote live and my colleagues in the law school watched the televised proceedings from the atrium on the second floor. My mother, Eric, and I sat in my den in front of the television, watching for the inevitable—at worst, my final humiliation; at best, no more than I had expected all along.

The tension and nervousness of the senators showed through the veneer of the count’s formality. The networks carried the vote almost as if it were a sporting event. For added drama, one broadcaster carried a live videotape of Clarence Thomas’ mother watching the proceeding from her home in Pin Point, Georgia. When it was completed, Clarence Thomas succeeded Thurgood Marshall as associate justice of the Supreme Court, by a 52–48 vote, the narrowest margin of any Supreme Court nominee in history. The four-vote margin was much slimmer than what had been projected early on, though to the three of us it seemed like a resounding victory.

Out of kindness or perhaps their own hurt, Eric and my mother sat speechless, staring at the proceedings. Not wanting to say anything that might intensify or invalidate my reaction, they awaited my response. “Well, that’s that,” I remarked, the first to break the silence. Though the words lacked profundity or insight into my feelings, they served the purpose of allowing us all to exhale simultaneously. Ironically, my usually circumspect mother was the first to voice her emotion. “The dirty rascals,” she declared of the Senate. A pained and angry Eric remained silent. I tried to maintain my dignity, resisting any sort of outburst that would only make matters more painful than the whole episode had already been. “It’s okay,” my mother said, trying to console me. “You did the right thing.” She was her usual self—short of words and to the point.
I realized that both Eric and I were products of a guarded way of dealing with life’s disappointments that had been passed from her to us, just as it had probably been passed from her parents to her.

Immediately after the vote, President Bush pronounced Thomas a “wonderful inspiration” and congratulated him for a job “well done.” Meanwhile, Thomas’ mother, Leola Williams, admonished me to pray about what I had done. She could never know how much I had prayed all along and would continue to pray. Oddly, I connected with her. Like my own parents, she, too, had become a part of the media spectacle.

A cadre of reporters, the persistent ones who followed me home, now gathered at my front door. I answered the doorbell knowing that ignoring them would only lead to baseless speculation or worse intrusions by the less responsible members of the group. “How do you feel about the vote?” a reporter asked. The question was inane, and I could not even begin to articulate an answer. How I “felt about the vote” got jumbled together with a myriad of feelings I had about the leak, the hearing, the process, and the people on my step. I could assign any one of many emotions to the vote—disappointment, hurt, outrage, hope, embarrassment, disillusionment. A clever sound bite would have been in order, but I had no handler or spinmeister to prepare me. The way of modern journalism, reducing persons to icons, appeared at that moment to have lost its skill for dealing with mere human beings. My mother and Eric were not public relations experts, and there was no one else there or behind the scenes who was. I managed a brief statement composed as I stood there in front of them. I was “disappointed but not surprised” at the vote. Having one week earlier shared a wholly humiliating experience on national television out of responsibility to the judiciary confirmation process, I now wanted to keep private any humiliation and resentment out of responsibility to myself and my family.

The group of reporters jotted down the few words that came from my mouth. The experience had made us more “aware of the problem of sexual harassment” and better “informed about the confirmation process.” Finally, I responded, “What I hope is that none of this will deter others from coming forward. This is an important issue and the dialogue
will not stop here.” I had no inkling of the magnitude with which that prediction would be fulfilled.

Stepping back inside from the doorstep with two of the people I hold dearest in life beside me, I felt far removed from the hearing, the demonstrations which followed, and the Senate vote. That was all I wanted—to find the peace in my life that had vanished with the leak of my statement. And for a short while I believed that once I went inside and was alone with my family, it would all be over. The following morning, October 16, 1991, Erma Hill would be eighty years old. I wanted to believe that, come morning, that would be all that mattered.

Having achieved their goal, the persistent ones left, only to be followed within half an hour by another slightly less aggressive group who’d respected my desire to make no comment. Now they felt obligated to pursue a statement. It did not matter what I said; I was simply footage to be wired back to the studio. Had I not been tired and somewhat disgusted by it all, I might have seen the humor in the competitive frenzy of the press corps. But by that time, I saw little humor in any of it. “I already said everything that I have to say,” I told them. “Well, just repeat what you told the last group,” they instructed, trying to ensure that they had something to return to their employers. In the end, I gave the statement again. These, after all, had been the polite ones—the ones willing to respect my privacy at the risk of missing some scoop of news. Over the past week, I had learned that politeness only went so far in the “news” business, and in the coming months that lesson would be reinforced. I would also learn that just as I had been powerless in becoming a part of a news story, I would be equally powerless as I attempted to retreat from it.

The impact of the emotions that had erupted during the hearings was greatly and lastingly felt. The feelings involved were strong enough to pull together a community which had as its core women who had experienced sexual harassment but never before complained or who had complained only to find that asserting their rights resulted in greater distress. The community was held together by outrage and a deeply felt
cause but had no clear outlet for either. What we now needed was policy, procedures, and accountability to deal with harassment. That was forthcoming as well. Rather than mushroom out of the hearing as the outpouring of stories had, the establishment of law and practices would evolve in a heuristic, trial-and-error manner over the next few years. But in time the strength of the community, developed during the hearing, would generate political and legal change.

At the same time that the feelings engendered by the hearing caused the emergence of one community, they threatened to splinter another. The African American community had been torn by the Thomas nomination itself, and the final round of the hearing with its allegations of racism splintered the community even further. I felt caught in the middle of the group that, though splintered over the nomination, was willing to cast me out for what was not so much an offense to Clarence Thomas as it was a breach of an unspoken pledge of solidarity to the African American community. By divulging information that was derogatory to a prominent African American, in the eyes of many I had done injury to the entire community far greater than Thomas could ever have done.

I was psychologically torn between two communities, both of which I belonged to by birth, chance, and choice. And while many members of one community embraced me, many members of the other shunned me. What we needed, in both cases, was leadership to help us to focus on the greater community goals. But for the time being none was forthcoming and I felt as though I were adrift.

Even religion turned against me, or I should say was turned against me. Thomas’ mother had been gentle in her admonition, but others purporting to speak for the church or God or both advised me to confess my sins, or worse, condemned me to “burn in hell” for my sin of testifying. Before long a few voices, speaking on behalf of a church or religion, would attempt to console me for the experience I had endured, but not before I had grown to distrust the church, if not religion itself.

At the same time, the state and university communities in which I lived and worked became the object of the political forces of the issues
raised in the hearing. The very places to which I had returned to escape the racial and gender politics of Washington, D.C., became the outlet of it all. Oklahoma, the place that my grandparents had seen as a place of refuge, once again proved to be as harsh as the place from which they and later I had fled.

T
he immediacy of the response to the hearing speaks to its instinctive nature. It was as though the hearing touched a nerve that sent sharp pains to the stomachs of women throughout the world. That pain urged them to respond. There was no strategic plan—no complex analysis of the issue. Something from within impelled women to participate. Immediately following the hearing, demonstrations against the Senate’s action and against sexual harassment began to take place. Mostly women demonstrated against confirmation of Thomas in Washington, D.C., on the steps of the Senate buildings. In cities around the world the message of outrage was almost universal. Mostly women protested the hearing; they protested the vote to confirm Thomas; they protested the existence of sexual harassment and the insensitivity to it demonstrated by their elected representatives. In Norman and in Stillwater, Oklahoma, sites of the college campuses for the state’s largest universities, women whose activities had been long abated seized the moment of awareness—or perhaps the moment seized them. On the campus of Oklahoma University a student who had been in Washington during the vote organized demonstrations, meetings, and seminars on and about sexual harassment and women’s social progress. Robin Drisco, a member of the staff of the local women’s center, established a local chapter of the National Organization for Women. Throughout the country other women were doing the same. Women who thought that
women’s legal rights were protected against abuse realized that the law alone was not enough—that they, too, were vulnerable. They knew that the public had to be made aware of lingering sexism and that women had to be involved in making them aware.

The energy created by the furor over the hearing continued at a high pitch for months. Though I was aware of it, it was mostly as though it was happening in some other world. During the demonstrations, I was teaching my classes. During the rallies, I was responding to the backlog of telephone calls. During the seminars, I was answering questions for the investigation of the leak of my statement. It did not occur to me that all of the activity was about me, because it was not. The activity was about every woman who hurt because of the hearing. The hearing exposed a vacuum of understanding so massive and powerful that it would have sucked all of me into it had I not tried so hard to hang on to what was left of my life. Thus while others were organizing, rallying, and protesting against the hearing, I was trying to keep the experience at bay and to regain my health.

Despite the fact that I had papers to grade and an upcoming surgery, I was thrilled to finish my last class for 1991. I limped into December on what little reserve energy remained after the hearing and subsequent coverage. By December 18, 1991, surgery provided a strange kind of relief. Forced bedrest was the only thing that would have stopped what had become endless and tiresome activity. That morning I was apprehensive—trying to prepare myself in case the worst occurred. The doctor had all but ruled out the possibility of a cancerous growth, but some possibility remained. JoAnn, Mama, and I joked nervously in the moments before the anesthesiologist administered the sedative. Shortly afterward, in the surgery room everything went white as I counted backward from one hundred. I was out at eighty-eight.

As is normal following surgery, I woke up to ice-cold hands and feet. “Would you get my socks out of the suitcase?” I asked JoAnn. Her face and my mother’s were the first thing I saw when I woke. Someone flashed a Polaroid photograph in front of me. “Look what they found,”
someone said. Dr. Melanie Gibbs, my surgeon and gynecologist, had photographed the tumors and cysts they removed from my body. To my doctor’s surprise, there were about eighteen in total. The largest pale pinkish glob was no less than six inches in diameter. Two others were roughly the same size. The smallest was a bluish gray glob about half an inch in diameter. Thankfully, none of them were malignant. She had performed a myomectomy, removing only the growths and leaving intact the uterus.

Gradually, other faces appeared as my family and friends crowded into the small hospital room. “She looks so little,” said Eric, looking away. He was unaccustomed to a helpless “Auntie Faye.” My mother asked how I felt. My mind suggested that I was happy to see them, but all my body wanted was sleep. Somewhere in the recesses of what thoughts I could muster through the haze of the anesthetic, I wanted to lapse into a state of physical semiconsciousness and wake up days later, fully rested and refreshed. But of course, I woke the next day feeling sore, stiff, and hollow inside. Ray appeared that day at my hospital bedside to serve as my chief nurse. Despite the pain and mild depression I felt between naps, his face was a welcomed sight.