Grace and Grit

by Lilly Ledbetter

  Jon’s task was to prove through both direct and circumstantial evidence that my claims were true. Direct evidence could be documents, what people said, actual salary differences; circumstantial evidence required the jurors to infer that something was indeed a conclusive fact, and usually required eliminating all other possible explanations of the question: Why was I, one of the only female managers in Goodyear’s history with hundreds of male employees, making so much less?

  Jon figured that Goodyear would argue that I was making less because I was a poor performer. On this issue we had the burden of proof; we had to show that I was discriminated against through the evidence we gathered in discovery.

  For several weeks before the trial, I spent every day with Jon at his office preparing. He explained in great detail the significance of each exhibit and made sure I understood the legal language pertaining to the damages. We would run through the witness list discussing who might say what. We practiced what it would be like when I was on the witness stand by rehearsing questions he would ask me as well as what the defense could throw at me. “Stick to the truth,” he reminded me, “and you’ll do fine.”

  But many nights before the trial I stayed awake worrying. If I lost in court, I had no idea whether or not Goodyear could hold me accountable financially. I was scared we’d lose our house, and the fear inside me sat heavy and thick. During those sleepless nights, Charles would hear me rustling around in the den, flipping channels. He’d come in and sit next to me on the sofa. He’d wrap his arm around me, asking, “Are you sure you know what you’re doing?”

  I’d involuntarily pull away from him. I’m not much of a physically affectionate person to begin with, but when I’m agitated—the reason I was up in the middle of the night in the first place was that I’d gotten us into such a mess—I need some breathing room. “No. I have no idea what I’ve gotten myself into.”

  He’d move back next to me, ignoring the careful distance I tried to maintain between myself and the world. “You don’t have to go through all of this.”

  “We’re too far into it, and too many people are counting on us. I have to go through with it. I can’t let it go. We can’t let people do me, do us, like that.” I kept clicking the TV remote held rigidly in front of me as I searched for something to distract me in the flickering light of late-night TV.

  Charles would get up and fix his bowl of Frosted Flakes, and we’d switch between the two shopping channels until we went back to bed. I can’t imagine another man in the world who would have stood by me like Charles did.

  THE DAY of the trial was finally upon us. How would my experience at Goodyear be summarized in a few days in the courtroom? It seemed as impossible as squeezing someone’s life into a newspaper snippet on the obituary page. The night before the trial, I prayed and reviewed my five-hundred-page deposition. All that mattered, I reminded myself, was what I knew in my heart was true—what was right. I remembered what I had been through. I knew that whatever would happen in court would be nothing like what I’d dealt with before.

  That morning I dressed in black slacks and a blue shirt as if I was going to work, with the one addition of a black jacket, in deference to Jon’s request that I dress up. Jon wanted me to wear a skirt and heels to trial, but I dressed like I did every day as an area manager in the tire room. I always wore black pants, to hide the grease stains, and on most days, a blue shirt. During the trial, I wasn’t trying to be someone else. I was simply trying to get back what I’d rightfully earned doing the job I’d been hired to do.

  ON A bitterly cold January 21, 2003, after we drank an entire pot of coffee, Charles and I drove to the Anniston courthouse.

  After parking in front of the two-story stone-and-brick courthouse on Noble Street, Charles paused inside the car a minute, letting the engine run, the heat still blowing on us.

  He turned to me. “Well, this is it. This is what we’ve been working toward for a long time.”

  I nodded and rubbed my hands together. “It’s here now,” I said, putting on my warm gloves. The courthouse’s white Corinthian columns loomed before us.

  He leaned over and kissed my forehead, then turned off the engine and gave me a quick pat on the back.

  “It’s time to see how it goes.” He opened his door, and a blast of cold air smelling like the car’s exhaust fumes enveloped us.

  When Charles and I went inside the courtroom, we sat on the benches behind the table where Jon was sitting; the sleekly dressed defense attorneys, Jay St. Clair and Ronald Kent, had staked out the table next to the jury box. Suited for battle, his leather shoes shining, Mr. St. Clair looked through his notes. Mr. Kent, a young, clean-cut man, chatted with the human resources manager at Goodyear, a man I liked and got along with, who sat between them at their table.

  Earlier, Jon had wheeled in several flimsy brown boxes spilling over with documents. They looked a bit tattered. He had also arranged several large charts near the shaky easel. I hoped it wouldn’t topple over in the small courtroom. To our relief, Jon’s partner Mike Quinn showed up at the very last minute.

  One thing we had going for us was the fact that Jon and Mike made such a good team; they complemented each other well. A short man in his sixties, Mike was a veteran attorney with an open manner. He spoke with extraordinary ease, and I got the impression that, as gregarious as he was, he was comfortable talking to people from all walks of life. He seemed like he would be as much at home shooting the breeze with a neighbor on the front porch as he would dealing with corporate heads in the boardroom. Jon was more reserved, and the most driven, hardworking individual I’d ever met. He was relentless in his focus and pursuit of justice. If anybody could win this case, I believed it was Jon, though he was worried that the jury wouldn’t take too kindly to a Jewish lawyer—in the heart of a rural county he could be seen as just another liberal do-gooder from out of town telling the locals how to run their business.

  Before jury selection, Judge Clemon urged Mr. St. Clair and Mr. Kent to settle the case. They made an offer, but it was too low.

  Once the jury selection began, men and women from the surrounding counties filed into the courtroom. One woman who was around my age looked like she could be my sister—the defense eventually eliminated her as one of their three strikes. The group was asked questions you would expect—whether anyone knew me or my family or had worked at Goodyear. Then the questions ranged from what their favorite TV shows were to whether they owned businesses, held management positions, and believed men should be paid more than women. An hour later a jury of seven was struck. The course of the remaining years of my life rested in the hands of seven strangers. Jury duty was probably the last thing in the world they wanted to do. Until now I’d always viewed it as an inconvenience. Never again.

  Trying not to stare at them, I wondered what opinions they’d already formed of me, of Jon and Mike, of the Goodyear team. At first glance, I was most intrigued by the young man in his forties who was a nurse. I wondered if the young, heavyset woman and the middle-aged working woman—the only two women in the group—had had any experiences similar to mine. An older man who’d retired recently from a paper company looked like he could have been buddies with some of the Goodyear men outside in the hallway. There was no way to know how and what they might think and feel about me or my testimony.

  ONCE THE jury settled into the jury box, I was called as the first witness. Stepping onto the stand, I faced Mr. St. Clair and his team on my immediate left. I was as far away as I could be from Jon and Mike. The empty balcony across from me, the high vaulted ceilings, and the wood paneling reminded me of the courtroom in the movie To Kill a Mockingbird. A lot had changed in the South since 1936, when that story took place; this time it was the judge, not the defendant, who was an African American. We would soon find out whether attitudes about women had changed significantly in north Alabama.

  Opening first, Jon stood before me to begin his questioning. For a brief moment, I was flooded with a terrible foreboding
, the sense that I’d made an awful mistake, done something foolish like lighting a cigarette next to a gas pump. Once Jon started asking me questions, my sense of doom slowly lifted. I kept my gaze steady on him pacing the room, every once in a while running his hand over the top of his cropped hair when he paused, thinking, before another question. Anchored by his confidence and determination, I answered him.

  Jon first asked me to discuss the progression of positions I’d held throughout my career in general and at Goodyear. In the course of this description, he established that I was a high achiever, noting the objective ranking as the second-highest out of almost one hundred employees who’d taken an electrical and mechanical test in 1985 when the scope of the area manager’s duties broadened at the plant. He also wanted to know about the end of my career when I was supervised by the plant manager who had said the plant didn’t need women because we caused problems.

  He let those words linger for a moment before he asked if anything else was said. Mr. St. Clair, who throughout the trial would jump up unexpectedly like a jack-in-the-box to object, made his first objection but was overruled.

  “One of my former bosses who had been a business-center manager told me that he asked Eddie, ‘When are you going to get rid of the drunk and that damn woman?’ ” I answered.

  After Jon asked how many other women managers were at Goodyear when I was working at the end—I knew of none—he offered as his first exhibit a pay chart for my beginning salary; it showed my salary along with those of the five men I started with in 1979. Mr. St. Clair tried to object, stating that the pay chart wasn’t relevant because those salary decisions were made so long ago, but again he was overruled. Jon stood next to the chart, blown up so everyone could see the numbers, while the jury was given a sheet of paper with the same information.

  As the chart indicated, we’d all made the same amount on April 1, 1979, and continued to earn the same salaries, $18,216.96, a few months later in October, after we’d all received a raise.

  Jon continued to ask me questions about my experiences over nineteen years at Goodyear. He showed that when I complained at the end of my career about the memo addressed to “Boys,” it was shortly afterward that I was told that I needed to apply for the technology engineer opening. After I was transferred to technology engineer, I was replaced by a young man who was promoted from being a union tire builder. The exhibit Jon offered outlined the difference in our pay.

  This young man, still in his twenties, had started in 1994, and less than ten years later his salary was almost double mine, at over $81,000; after almost twenty years, when I retired, I was making $44,724.

  Jon wound down his direct examination, asking me how it felt to be paid less, to be punished for the tire hold, to be transferred to a physically grueling job. He ended his questioning by inquiring whether I’d gone over the back-pay calculations with the paralegal, comparing my salary with that of the other folks I worked with. I had.

  “Who was ranked lower than you on many occasions?”

  “Matt Brown.” He’d been hired at the same time I was, and though he was ranked lower, he was paid significantly more.

  AT THE end of Jon’s questioning, I wondered how in the world the jury could keep up with all of the information. We had jumped from one department to another and one manager to another, skipping all over the place. The pieces of this puzzle seemed too hard to fit together, but I knew Jon had to cover all areas of evidence supporting our position. I hoped the jurors could make the right connections because I could barely sort through it all, and I was the one who’d lived it.

  Then Mr. St. Clair stood up and walked toward me smiling. I took a deep breath.

  He began by asking me if I was as qualified as a man who had been called back as an area manager after the 1998 buyout.

  He was trying to get me to say I was as qualified so he could prove all the ways I wasn’t. “I could do my job,” I answered.

  Then he asked me to define a tire hold and asked didn’t I scrap $10,000 worth of tires?

  He wanted yes or no answers, so I could not offer an explanation to establish the context of the situation. I felt like I was playing a game of dodge, not dodging the truth but avoiding setting myself up for him to distort my truth. “I don’t know. I didn’t see the tires. I didn’t see the paperwork. They didn’t show them to me.”

  “You don’t deny that?”

  “I can’t admit to it, because I didn’t see the paperwork. See, that’s what scared me so much. You know, when we had—when I had builders that had scrap, especially if it was ten thousand dollars’ worth—even if it was two tires, four hundred dollars’ worth—I’d carry them out on the dock or carry them to shipping, we would examine them, see why it’s scrap and what we need to do to correct it.”

  Next he jumped to my transfer: Weren’t you told you were on a long list of layoffs? The implication being that I was lucky to be transferred at all.

  I replied, “I didn’t hear ‘long list.’ ”

  In an exaggerated, indignant voice, he picked up my deposition. “Don’t you remember I took your deposition?” He flipped to a page. “And do you recall you were placed under oath?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  He turned to a page and made me read out loud what I’d said, which was that I was on a long list of layoffs in 1997. But that’s not what he’d asked me. He’d asked me whether I’d been told by Eddie that I was on a long list. I hadn’t been told that in those exact words. He was playing games, twisting things just enough to make it so confusing that I looked like I was lying. He did this the entire time. He wanted the jury to think I was making things up. When he berated me so intensely about the details of the 1986 and 1997 layoffs, Judge Clemon finally said, “Are you about finished along this line?”

  By the end of the first day, I was ready to step off the stand. Before I could help myself, I’d gotten testy with Mr. St. Clair too many times. It was hard to tell from anyone’s expressions how things were going. Charles and Phillip sat behind Jon and Mike (Vickie would come the next day), but they didn’t register much emotion as we all endured the punishing atmosphere of that initial day in court.

  That night when Charles and I walked into the kitchen after a long, quiet ride home, I flipped on the light, glancing at the clock. It was time for our show to come on.

  “Hey, Law & Order is on tonight,” I automatically reminded him like I always did.

  He gave me a halfhearted smile. “No, thanks. I’ve had enough of courtroom drama for one day, thank you very much.”

  Unable to go to bed right away, we watched an old dance video instead.

  THE FIRST thing the next morning I returned to the stand and that sly Mr. St. Clair focused immediately on the tire hold again.

  “You admit to making an error in regards to the tire hold, don’t you, Mrs. Ledbetter?”

  The words stumbled from my mouth as I tried to make him understand my point: When I said that I couldn’t answer, my words were based on what I was told, not on what I believed I had done. Judge Clemon stopped me with a simple “All right.” I looked over at Charles. His expression didn’t change, but he gave me a slight nod as if to reassure me and encourage me to stay strong. I recrossed my legs to regain my composure.

  Mr. St. Clair moved on, referring to Eddie. “You can’t say he didn’t like you because of what happened twenty years ago—he sent you a nice note in 1992, didn’t he?” he asked. Yes, it was a congratulatory note. Then in a tone one uses when trying to explain a very simple idea to a confused child, Mr. St. Clair continued his questioning, implying that in 1997, when Eddie could have laid me off, in a magnanimous gesture he transferred me to the technology engineer position. In other words, this generous, kind man was really looking out for my best interests, and I was too dumb to see it.

  “Many people think this technology engineer job is a good job, don’t they? Now, I know you said that you didn’t think it was a good job, but that’s not what everyone in the plant thought,
was it?” he continued. “There were people who wanted those jobs.” He picked up my deposition as if brandishing a weapon. He plucked a single line from the impossibly thick book and read my observation to the jury that one man thought my job as technology engineer was better than his job working in the pits; he’d remarked to me one day that it was a great injustice to him that I had gotten the position.

  I was getting aggravated again. “I don’t think so. I think he’s the only one.”

  He wielded my deposition again. “Look with me, please, ma’am, at page 243 of your deposition.” He stopped to remind the jury that I had said these words “under oath” before he read that I said that a lot of people who had harder jobs in that department viewed the position I had as better; it was a promotion in their eyes, not a demotion as it had been for me.

  Satisfied with his point, he turned to the pay chart and started nitpicking about the fact that all the men with higher salaries did not start at the exact same time I did, as I’d said. He showed their employee records and their start dates. What he was saying didn’t make sense, though. These men all started in management around the same time I did. He was going to ridiculous means to prove that my claims were not based in the truth. And the truth, I worried, was only what the defense attorneys, as charming as snake-oil salesmen, convinced the jury to believe.

  During Mr. St. Clair’s harangue about the exact start dates, Judge Clemon finally interrupted to ask, “Isn’t the relevant history when they were hired in the supervisory position?”

  So Mr. St. Clair switched his focus to the year 1981, when Goodyear implemented a merit-based program to replace the cost-of-living raises they’d given in prior years. I didn’t know it at the time, but it was only after this program was implemented that my pay and that of the other managers began to diverge. But now, through the discovery process, I’d seen my peers’ raises and compared them with mine.