We became brothers-in-law. As the years and decades passed, we didn’t see each other all the time, but were always laughing the couple of times a year we did, invariably surrounded by family. In his mid-fifties, and after years in corporate law, Steve followed his sister’s path and became a judge. Cancer came, but he outdid his oncologist’s predicted life expectancy by more than a year. He stayed alive and in the job he loved long enough to lock in benefits so that his wife, Chris, and the kids he adored were completely set. But all of that came later. The day after the general election, Lisa wept when she and Caleb told me about Steve’s diagnosis.
Two days after the general election, Nate and Caleb and I were in New York City. We were all dressed up and headed for the memorial service for Lisa’s aunt Kate in a huge church that faces Washington Square Park. Lisa had gone ahead earlier to be with Kate’s people and to finalize the eulogy she had prepared. When we got to the church, Lisa was onstage, seated with other speakers.
Because Kate had died in September in Paris, the memorial service in the United States came later. Naturally, it was held in Greenwich Village, where Kate had spent most of her years living and writing, working with the leading feminists of her time, socializing with Yoko Ono and John Lennon and other luminaries—actors and writers and such—when she wasn’t somewhere else, like her Christmas tree farm, which she bought with book royalties and where she founded a utopian summer community for women artists from everywhere.
Nate and Caleb and I and other family sat in the front rows next to Lisa’s mom, Sally, who was Kate’s older sister and also had been her protector in many ways. Sally was my protector, too, having loaned me a few bucks to start my law practice in the early 1990s. In her forties, Sally became a family lawyer in Nebraska, a law partner, a savvy businesswoman and small-time investor. As a family lawyer, Sally changed Nebraska law so that a woman could keep her birth name, even after marriage. She helped change state law so that each spouse’s pension was shared in divorce, an asset she was denied at divorce after twenty years as a military wife. Sally, too, had raised hell as a feminist, debating Phyllis Schlafly on the Equal Rights Amendment on television and speaking publicly to support the ERA when she wasn’t quietly breaking into the men’s club of attorneys in Omaha, spending time in the company of radical nuns, or even more quietly helping young women get through difficult times in a conservative place.
Sally and many of the other best hell-raisers on the planet were in that sanctuary, grayed-out and disguised by time. They were fierce. Sally, the boys, and I sat, watching veteran feminists like Gloria Steinem slowly circulate and greet one another under the gaze of journalists and filmmakers. Sally could still pick out Kate’s colleagues. Some were feminists I knew about. Others had names I didn’t know. Collectively, their sweeping victories advanced movements for equal rights for women, and for LGBTQ rights, including same-sex marriage, that are the legacies of their lives’ work. Those legacies loomed over their slightly stooped shoulders in the cavernous heights of the church.
Lisa climbed the elevated stone pulpit and began her eulogy by remembering Kate through a child’s eyes. Kate was fun, an aunt who sat on the floor and played with her nieces and nephews, yet who always spoke to them like they were adults entirely ready for the world and possessed of ideas that needed to be heard. Kate led the nephews and nieces in art projects not unlike the sculptures she made from found objects and sold and exhibited in galleries or the colorful silk screens she made and sometimes captioned with calligraphy inspired by the time she lived in Japan, where she and Yoko Ono became friends before Yoko was with John. In Kate’s sculpture, the two striped legs of a stool emerged from plaster-filled, worn leather boots. Other pieces of furniture got arms or heads, as if nothing should be held down or objectified, not even an object. Lisa eulogized Kate’s brilliant wordplay. Kate believed in the power of words to heal or to harm. Like her theories of freedom, Kate’s style in writing was more creative than rule-bound. It challenged some of her editors. Multisyllabic words describing theory butted up against colloquial words of a syllable or two. Sometimes she wrote in a stream of consciousness. Kate communicated how she wanted.
To please family, Lisa left out the story of Kate’s wedding gifts to us. They were silk screens Kate had made and brought to the wedding—one for Lisa and one for me. But I knew what Lisa skipped and was smiling as she spoke. Lisa’s silk screen spoke to her limitless potential. My silk screen was the outline of a pair of breasts, painted in a calligraphic style in black ink with a brush. Its caption began: “Every young man should have a pair of these at hand…on his wedding day.”
Aunt Kate, as Lisa called her, emerged from a small Catholic school in St. Paul, Minnesota, where she disrupted by shyly questioning everything. She graduated with honors from the University of Minnesota, Oxford, and Columbia, and later was called a leader of the feminist movement in the 1960s and 1970s, along with her sisters Gloria Steinem, Flo Kennedy, Betty Friedan, and Adrienne Rich, among many others. Her initial prominence came from her Ph.D. thesis at Columbia University, which was turned into the book Sexual Politics, an eloquent dissection of male domination and its reflection in literature. Kate’s thesis was that some “classic” literature was infected with sexual politics, worded subtly, often beautifully, to program women’s subordinate role; the writing’s oppressive power was subconscious, nearly invisible. That wonky Ph.D. thesis became a popular bestseller in 1970. Kate’s description of patriarchy alone is worth the read. She joined with other members of their movement to use protest to move women’s rights and the rights of other oppressed groups forward. Kate fearlessly traveled to Iran at a dangerously repressive time after other leading American feminists backed out because the U.S. government warned it could not protect them. In Iran, Kate was imprisoned while organizing women to fight for their rights.
Kate knew instinctively that becoming the personification of a movement was wrong. She knew the notion of an exceptional leader singlehandedly changing history is nonsense. Movements meet their time; at most, so-called leaders merely help that along. More likely, the so-called leaders are fungible and contingent, made by their movements and by luck. When Time magazine told her she would be on its cover for Sexual Politics, she told them to put the movement on the cover and declined to provide a photo or sit for a photo shoot. So Time commissioned a stern-looking painted image of her that didn’t evoke her famously impish smile and charming, cutting personality. Time put that painted image on its cover in 1970. Even when Kate eschewed leadership, feminism’s opponents called her a leader to set her up as a target. Her reluctant identification as a leader, coupled with her bisexuality, allowed opponents of feminism to hit her in hopes of fracturing the women’s movement. For some in the movement, her difference in sexual orientation, and the difference of others like her, would divide the movement and narrow its immediate goals to those of straight women.
Kate’s impact is still felt, but she was abused and marginalized for her difference, and pushed out of academia—where she belonged. Her greatest legacy may be that she was so willing to push feminism forward at the expense of her ego. She pushed feminism forward, then got out of its way.
Fifty years later, looking around at Kate’s memorial service, it appeared time was bonding the divides in feminism between straight and gay women, Black and white. Time and a movement had turned ideas that were at first radical and scary into ideas that were commonplace. There was enough room in that church for all of feminism. We were there to celebrate a life, but we knew not to confuse one person’s brief life or life’s work with the timeless legacy of a movement it served.
Like me in my twenties, Caleb turned out to be lucky in losing his job—because he got hired again quickly, within a month. When his start-up failed in November, big tech declined to buy the company or to pay its founders for the company’s ideas. Instead, big tech competed for and hired the company’s talent to work on audio technolo
gy ideas and projects for them, including some that were similar to the noise-canceling earbuds of the start-up.
Caleb’s new job in December kept him in the work he loved in the place where he wanted to make a future, but it meant he would miss the swearing-in ceremony at the beginning of January. He had too few days on the new job to take off more time. As a child and a teen, he had attended both of his mother’s swearing-in ceremonies, but I didn’t mind. I was still the guy who skipped my college and law school graduations to chase my future. I was even a little jealous that Caleb started his new job in 2017 before I finally got to start mine at the beginning of 2018, after so much delay. Time wasn’t waiting for any of us.
After so many changes in my private life reminded me that we are frail, our plans contingent, the illusion of leadership a trap our enemies lay to scuttle the timeless ideas a movement represents, another blow came. This one reminded me again how precious it is to be allowed to do your life’s work for the people.
CHAPTER 16
Ryden
I want to fly like an eagle
Till I’m free
Oh, Lord, through the revolution
—Steve Miller Band, “Fly Like an Eagle”
The history of American crime and justice is a history of lives lost and freedom stolen. Coast to coast, America is a blood-red map, pockmarked with jails and prisons built on the dehumanized foundations of empire and slavery and more guns than people. A life’s work in public service in criminal justice is about making a future that escapes that ugly history. But that future isn’t some abstraction in the distance: It begins with the next crime, ideally handled by people on all sides who have found their calling. At their best, criminal justice workers act in different ways to avoid the next act that harms, to prevent the next victimization, to erase the next unjust year of incarceration. They are winning their good fight because their joy is in fighting with open hearts and brilliant minds to find the truth that points toward accountability and freedom based on justice. At their best, the people who work to reform American criminal justice know that every life is everything. At their best, they are a lot like Ryden.
I was playing poker on a Sunday afternoon when I got the phone call that first told me the news about Ryden Nelson, a hard-core volunteer I met and first knew through the campaign. I had recently written him a glowing recommendation for his law school application. He mailed that application the day before I got the call. On the phone, I heard the words “brain bleed,” “coma,” “a few days,” “not sure.” I felt like somebody had hit me with a rock.
Poker club was an octet of old and almost-old men who played monthly, except in the summer. We were in a small farmhouse on an acre of woodsy land within the city limits, gently modernized by Jamie Wyper, its architect owner. Winter sunlight was pouring in the abundant windows; the place was heated by a wood fire in a cast-iron stove. I had been talking to the club’s eighty-plus-year-old founder, Armand Mednick, when I got the call. It was around two o’clock, right after the customary ritual of the carefully prepared midday meal complete with appetizers and dessert. You had to be able to cook to play. Wine came with the meal; then came conversation. After-dinner drinks and cigars were available before a couple more hours of poker started.
The club was over fifty years old, still led by Armand, a Belgian Jewish child survivor of the Holocaust. On the run, he contracted tuberculosis. His family concealed him in a Parisian Catholic orphanage under a phony Christian name. He lived there and in a sanatorium, surrounded by doting women, many mothers whose tuberculosis had separated them from their children. Armand lost everyone in his immediate family, and fifty-five people in his extended family died at Buchenwald. Only Armand and a few cousins survived and made their way to America.
Armand spent his life as a potter, sculptor, and teacher of generations of art students in a private school in Northwest Philadelphia. When I got the news about Ryden, at first I couldn’t talk. I cleared my throat and explained to Armand why I had to leave immediately. He looked at me with a steady gaze and sat quietly for a moment. I remembered he had lost his son after a terrible accident. He gave me a hug and told me we would see each other soon.
I rushed to the hospital with Lisa, a little unsure of whether I’d be able to find Ryden, be allowed in, or even be welcome in such a crisis. At the hospital, Ryden’s dad, Robert, told us Ryden was in a coma. He had suffered a severe brain bleed from a rare and previously undiagnosed arteriovenous malformation (AVM), a vascular anomaly in his brain that had ruptured. Earlier that evening, Ryden and his medical-student girlfriend had hosted a small dinner party for friends. She was visiting from New York over the holidays. When the bleed hit, they were in bed, asleep at first as he began to seize. Her presence and her medical knowledge are likely why Ryden was so quickly hospitalized and survived. Robert said there were real concerns that Ryden had suffered losses to his cognitive functioning; his future was uncertain. Near Ryden’s ICU room, about fifteen of his friends, kind and decent young people from all over the United States, were in the waiting room and adjusting to the news.
The name “Ryden” is an anglicized version of Raijin, the Japanese thunder god. Ryden is the only child of his Japanese American mother, Jean, and Anglo father, Robert, who met on a Bay Area Rapid Transit train when she was a student at Berkeley and he was working at a bank. At first, Ryden’s maternal grandmother protested her new grandson’s name, calling it a yakuza (gangster) name. But Ryden is no gangster.
I first met Ryden early in my campaign at headquarters. A recent Wesleyan University grad, he was a bright, tall, quiet, humble young man wearing a black leather jacket who vaguely reminded me of Keanu Reeves in a more philosophical moment (and without firearms). His day job was union organizing among hotel workers.
Pushing for his beliefs was not new to Ryden. In college, he had been instrumental in ending the few remaining frats, which he viewed as pits of misogyny and boot camps for addiction and bad behavior. While in high school, he was a mainstay writer for the Daily Urinal, an independent student publication that derived its name from its early history as a single photocopied sheet of paper posted at eye level above the urinals in the boys’ bathrooms. Ryden’s muckraking was best remembered in high school for his commentary regarding a prominent donor to the school who also funded anti-gay legislation.
Ryden was all for change, and he was selfless. He found freedom in high school by sticking up for LGBTQ students and making trouble for himself; he wasn’t one of them. He found freedom in college sticking up for women and making trouble for himself; he wasn’t a woman. He traveled to the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation to support Native American rights; he wasn’t indigenous. His first job after college was sticking up for poorly compensated workers who hadn’t been to college, many of whom were immigrants. He was a U.S. citizen with a prestigious college degree who could have made a lot more money doing something else. But he felt whole when he was working for other people, not as a concept, but for each one of them and in each of their unique lives. The resistance he got from power only confirmed that what he was doing mattered in ways that were little and big. And Ryden had never been stepped on by the criminal justice system, but he stepped up for our reform campaign.
During our campaign for district attorney, Ryden and his bicycle were our key delivery system for lawn signs and literature. He was a steady presence as a volunteer staffer; his remarkable intelligence, diligence, and ability to work with anyone were obvious and advanced his role in the campaign. He showed he was a quiet leader, equally blessed with charisma and humility. On occasion Ryden joined me at certain campaign events where we had time to talk. His interest in law was apparent. His attachment to the movement for criminal justice reform was clear.
When I worked in New York for homeless people during law school, I spent time with some Catholic Workers, followers of Dorothy Day, who lived together and helped homeless people b
y pursuing what they cryptically called “the little way.” My dumbed-down understanding was that their calling was helping people in need, and their method included being willing to do the humblest, smallest, least noticed tasks: fixing and washing homeless people’s feet, like Jesus; washing their clothes. The little way. The Catholic Workers were expressing their own imperfection and their equality with the homeless people they helped while deeply connecting with them by serving their smallest needs. It was beautiful to see. There was no possibility I could discern the bigger picture, except perhaps an organic, multifold increase in the number and capacity of collective Catholic Worker homes. Catholic Workers stayed very close, direct, little, quiet.
And I thought that described what I knew of Ryden then, but it didn’t. He had a larger vision, too. Ryden’s countless hours of volunteer work on my campaign, like his thoughts about organizing downtrodden laborers, had him exploring a more systemic and sweeping and bigger approach to what people can do for one another, while his one-on-one union organizing remained a more personal and direct and “little” approach to helping others. As a very young man, Ryden was all about the good fight at its most intimate and unsung, but also in its data-driven, somewhat faceless and public aspect. He believed in public service—the giving of himself that connected him to others—in little and big ways and felt its exciting freedom coursing through his veins. People who haven’t felt it might look at what he did and misunderstand it as sacrifice. To him it was joy, a gift he received.
For the People Page 27