JUSTICE IS LOVE: a memoir of race, law, family and poetry

SNEAK PREVIEW from Your Verdict:  A Judge’s Reckoning with Law and Loss

A journalist once asked me how I’ve managed to overcome so much in my life.  The question stunned me.  It had never occurred to me that I had overcome anything.  I was just living my life.  What she was referring to, of course, was that, compared with many judges, my life has been unconventional.  A working class background.  Interracial marriage.  Welfare mother, Feminist. Community activist. Bi-sexuality. Poetry.  What bothers me about the question is the idea of overcoming something, as if I had to conquer my own life, when this life I’ve been making has also been making me.  I am a part of so many of the extraordinary, ordinary events and people in court.  People like myself, who try to face life and need a little help doing so.

                        This memoir is about all that, and some of the controversial cases where I presided as a county judge, as well as a lifelong power struggle between my mother and me.  We would sink into a sea of racism and rebuke, each of us trying to save herself while watching the other who could not swim.  It was always a question of who abandoned whom.

                        I write to those of you who have appeared in cases where I was the judge.   I give you in this book some of the fragments of my life, as you gave me yours, including, the distortions created by time and ego, by fear and desire.  I have discovered from years of listening to testimony that life stories sound much truer when broken into smaller pieces.  The fragments hang there in the air, near each other, waiting patiently for another piece to fall into place.  I have deliberately included pieces from my life to demonstrate the connections between my work and my life. A life and Life itself.  Impartiality does not mean forgetting who you are, and it can include keeping an open boundary between you as a judge and you as a person with a moveable frontier between you and others in the legal system.  Here I accept risks of being misunderstood, of being criticized professionally, or ridiculed publicly, or delivering a weapon to those who would hurt me.  

                        Please be patient with the process of moving in and out of the stories in this book.  I have laid out pieces of my whole life next to each other and braided them with stories from controversial court cases mixed with their historical era and social issues.  Relax and let me tell it my way.  This what I would tell myself when I’d become impatient with witnesses who wouldn’t tell their stories in the order I preferred.  Sometimes patience allows something in the process of telling a story the way one wants to tell a story, that affects its texture and its credibility.  What I want to open up is not a tabloid expose, but something more profound—the expression of the connections between us that I have tried to find deeply within myself in cases, where I could.  I want to show you a more complete inner look at judicial process than mere legal analysis or linear narration can offer.  For me, being a judge has been a little like falling in love, then having to face the hard work of building, maintaining and finally losing a relationship.  It is the closest thing a Catholic girl can come to becoming something like a priest.  I believe that the influx of women into law has the potential to transform the law itself, to add some flexibility and alignment to the law’s hard muscles.  Now that it is all at a distance, I am happy to shift to a softer, more open, more forgiving world along the edge of the law. 

                        I sit in the witness chair to speak to you.  It seems as though I’ve known you.  You’ve let me know so much and trusted me with decisions about your life, assuming me to be wise, even when I was not.  I both pleased and angered you.  From the bench I have expected witnesses to “drink at the icy fountain and tell the truth,” as the poet W. S. Merwin put it, and here I have asked the same of myself. 

                        You made a difference in my life, so that when I see courage now, I recognize it because I saw it in you.  When the politics of the court, or the community’s opinions were heavy or confusing, I would retreat to the repetition of our public conversation where all of that turmoil seemed so irrelevant.  You’d tell me parts of your life.  Your fears, your pain.  Your intentions.  I could see much of the rest, written as it was on your body and in your eyes.  I would feel grounded then, in that chair, on that platform, in that courtroom, under that robe.  I would feel myself again and dream that whatever can happen to you can happen to me.

Just Ice

Published in Texas Journal on Women and the Law

A measure of justice
40 pounds weighed on the public scale
the child's eyes
look down at his heart for mother.
It's Charleston.  1815.
A cup of cool mercy
on the bare backs
dry throats
eyes.

I wonder how, when.
I enter the courthouse from the hot sun,
the mercy of marble.
The line through the
metal detector
where we leave our knives with the guards
and take with us inside
all the forms of fear.

Each new day
a witness raises her hand
metal weights are adjusted
and a line solid and true
plumbs through the floor to the courtroom below,
and the one below that
and that to
the center of the earth;  while we
sit here and scoop with spoons
the mighty mass of the law.

We listen for:  a clear deep tone
look for:  a gesture
of something true, oh
bring me something true.
Line up the cookie jars
at the dining room table
the headless doll
in the mahogany armchair
the recently discovered bottles of vodka,
spinning on the table
with all the spent shells,
your napkins slit into slivers of silk.

Tell me now
what is the exact distance
between this flesh and that?
Measure it precisely, Justice,
in fingers, please,
in car lengths,
paces,
a hundred yards of football fields,
the field of all our possibilities
dissolving like ice
on the hot Carolina auction block
just ice
a trickle of spray paint on the elevator wall.

My toes spread wide
and I push all my bones
into the solid ice
where I now stand.
We must find the words,
get it over with,
make them up
say anything,
before it all melts
the pool of rights and wrongs we fight for today.

The drone of the docket
quiet curses
summer odor of
too many bodies in
too small a space
people with so much nothing
those with too much heart
those without enough.

Every case picks, slices, carves 
what we believe and what we
do not, in the
eyes
dry throat
summer odor of bodies
all the forms of fear.

Give us what is clean and true.
Scoop  marrow from our bones
Let our feet grow plump and pink,
Let them step lightly now
not to be sacrificed

to the cotton gin

the thresher.

Beyond Portia: Women, Law and Literature in the United States

Co-editor (with Annette Bennington McElhiney)

This pioneering anthology presents a multicultural, interdisciplinary collage of women’s experiences with the law by mixing creative and analytical writings about family, abuse, and community in the context of feminist legal and literary theories. Beyond Portia opens with grounding essays in both literary and legal theory, and offers two collections of essays, stories, and poems that focus in turn on law and literature on families, and law and literature on abuse of women. Drawing on the idea that literature by women can offer material richer than the typical case fact pattern used in traditional legal training, the editors show that both literature and literary methods of reading can help articulate otherwise unspoken premises in legal decision-making, bringing them into the open for examination.

The Drama of the Long Distance Runners

Published in Thinking Women:  Introduction to Women’s Studies, Kendall-Hunt, 1995.
--Dedicated to workers in the battered women's movement

I watch you in the court
House coffee shop.  Sitting next to
The angry young woman.  The one with
A newborn tied to her chest.  Fear
And despair criss-cross her back.  You

Listen to her insults.  She storms away.  You
Chase after her touch her
Cold shoulder, her tears on the brink.  You
Hand her a card your
Home number on it.  Her
Link to hope on
Some other day
Some other day.  Some

Other day she calls you
Her lawyer and sets a date and later
You rant about her she
Didn’t show up she
Didn’t even call.  At night you

Sip your bourbon and seven you
Empty your pockets you
Search for change you
Search for change you
Have to know:

Is she safe?  Is she still
Alive?  On your way home you

Check the back seat, look over your
Shoulder form your card to our
Door.  At midnight you
Search for keys you
Rattle the kitchen lock one more time before you
Climb the stairs weary
To bed.

I watch you
Her therapist prepare your
Testimony your
Expert psychological testimony  you
Review the research you
Draft the report with your
Clinical observations you
Substantiate your opinions
Bear witness to corroborate her
Reality with your colder, calmer
Objectivity.  You try to balance her
Accounts, reconcile your perceptions with
Those of your science and those of the law.

Sometimes you stare at the wall and you
Cry.  You sit there cradling her fate
So carefully in your learned, aging hands.

I swallow
The Sunday news with my coffee.
Yet another women killed by her
Husbandwhoshothimselftoo.  But
This one,

This one might have been mine,
This one,

Had I not been book up
And had to say no,

This one,

Had she had the money on Thursday
Instead of on Monday,

This one.  I enter the funeral
Home to see her dead body
Dressed like a bride in a box

This familiar stranger I
Talked to over the phone
Once.

This one

Whose Monday appointment Ia
Can now scratch from my book.  You
Sign the book at the funeral for this one
And open this book to write a poem for

This one.