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.