by Anita Hill
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.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
The 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 f
ace 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.
“Mary Brown” was the name that appeared on my chart. It was the unimaginative choice I had chosen to register under in an effort to avoid pity for me, intrusion, or speculation about my condition. So, on the morning of December 20, when the press descended on the hospital, after some initial concern, I was certain that it was not for me. It turned out that Governor David Walters’ son, Shawn, had been brought to the hospital after an attempted suicide. From my window I could see the entrance to the hospital, where the press milled about relentlessly. My nurses complained that they couldn’t even enter the building without encountering cameras and reporters. From my vantage point, watching the mayhem, I could empathize, in a small way, with the intrusion the Walters family must be experiencing as Shawn Walters clung to his life before dying a few days later. The press was there throughout. Shawn’s tragic death was the culmination of all the pressures placed on the twenty-one-year-old, not the least of which was the continual press attention to his personal difficulties. The value of privacy is grossly underestimated until it’s been stolen from you.
I went home on Saturday, December 21—at the height of the holiday season. The reds and greens of the holiday meant little to me, the gray, damp December weather itself a better match for my disposition. On Christmas Day my mother, Ray, and I said grace over a quiet Christmas dinner. Though I admittedly had much to be thankful for, I felt little cheer and a small portion of the gratitude I had felt at Thanksgiving. For the first time in memory, my mother and father were apart at Christmas. JoAnn had picked my father up at the farm, and he had had Christmas dinner with her family in Tulsa. The week following Christmas passed and my mood changed only a little, though I attempted to be cheerful and gracious for my mother’s benefit and those who came to visit me.
Because my mother does not drive and the doctor had advised me not to, we were housebound, a condition which I do not tolerate gladly. The expenses for my family’s trip to Washington were mounting and with the recuperation came the time to consider the experience of the hearing. Back to me came the feeling that I had had as a child—the year of my father’s injury and my aunt’s death, the year we waited to learn whether my brother John would be sent to fight in Southeast Asia.
I was hurting, both emotionally and physically, and I was angry. “Why did they do this to me?” I asked myself. I was sure that nobody had an answer, least of all my friends and family. I prayed, mostly out of hope, but partly out of spite, that I would survive. Mostly, I wanted my life back for my sake, but, in addition, I was determined that my detractors would not have the satisfaction of stealing it.
On New Year’s Day Mama found a long-forgotten bag of black-eyed peas in the cupboard, and the two of us brought in the year in a traditional way. “Do you think they’re still good?” I questioned skeptically, recalling that Eric had sold them to me many years ago as part of a church fund-raising project. “We’ll soon find out,” was my mother’s response. In Owasso, JoAnn prepared the “good luck” peas for my father when he arrived on the farm with his delivery. Her husband, Jerry, made the corn bread to go with them. Again my parents were apart, but in spirit the family was together.
Gradually, my family, friends, and the hundreds of holiday cards and greetings I got from people around the country lifted me from the dark gray corner of my mind. Someone sent me a tape of Truman Capote reading “A Christmas Memory,” in which a young boy and his cousin make fruitcakes for everyone they know, as well as Eleanor Roosevelt. It amused and touched me. Then someone else sent me fruitcakes as a gift, and despite my apprehension in face of the death threats, I ate some. Soon the stiffness and soreness lifted and my mobility returned.
An ever-attentive nurse, my mother did not share my belief in the possibility of an expedited recovery. Dr. Gibbs had said that I could return to work six weeks after the surgery. Until then, she instructed me to be mobile but cautious. While Mama erred on the side of caution, I erred on the side of mobility. At my urging, a few days after New Year’s, my mother and I took a walk in the neighborhood. I overdid it, all the time hoping to hide my grimaces. I was successful in the deception, and the walk convinced her that I was well enough to be left alone. She returned home, and within three days I boarded an airplane for San Antonio, Texas, for the annual meeting of the Association of American Law Schools.
The trip did wonders for my spirits but, in fact, set back my recovery. Still, all things considered, it was a worthwhile junket. The collegiality which I always experienced at this meeting had special meaning coming within months of the hearing. The minority law teachers’ section, of which I was a member, and also the women’s section, of which I was not a member, honored me with two presentations. The warmth and the camaraderie expressed at those functions belied the stereotypical image of law professors. The issue and the event touched the human side of all of us, and these individuals seemed happy to have that side exposed.
Best of all, much of the legal team was reunited. Emma Coleman Jordan had organized a reception for the team, which grew to include a hundred or so of the law professors present at the meeting. Professor Jordan, there with her husband, Don, and two children, Kristen and Allison, was about to take over the position of president of the association. This responsibility followed a year as president-elect which included her participation in the hearing. In addition to her official responsibilities, she pulled together a gathering of friends and supporters with seeming ease, just as she had pulled together the legal team.
The outgoing president, Guido Calabresi, then the dean of the Yale Law School, was present at the reception as well. Dean Calabresi had testified in support of Thomas’ nomination in the first round of the hearing at the urging of Senator Danforth, another Yale Law School graduate. In short, Calabresi sought to convince the Judiciary Committee that Thomas had the capacity to grow into the role of associate justice. His was certainly no ringing endorsement of the nomination, but coming from a dean of a prestigious law school it was important.
I had known Dean Calabresi since he taught me torts in my first year of law school. As a professor he was a favorite among first-year law students, perhaps because he was more spontaneous in the classroom than his colleagues. Yale being the kind of school that it is and my being in the same profession as Calabresi meant that we saw each other from time to time professionally. I was fond of him, and when we saw each other, he seemed to be sincerely interested in my welfare. In the nearly twelve years since I graduated from law school, I had not returned, however, to New Haven. What, exactly, he thought of the Thomas nomination at the time of his testimony or even on that evening, I do not know. (Rumor has it that he called Danforth during the hearing and tried to dissuade him from smearing me.) That evening he seemed genuinely di
sturbed by the debacle which had unfolded in October 1991. And he delivered an invitation, partly at the encouragement of the students, for me to speak at Yale.
Like Professor Jordan, many of the members of my legal team were law professors. Professors Susan Deller Ross, Kim Taylor, Charles Ogletree, Shirley Wiegand, Kimberle Crenshaw, and Tania Banks had all been present in Washington and were now reunited in San Antonio. The occasion took on a lighthearted tone, though I suspect that what we were all feeling as much as anything was relief that the grueling process was over. I was also proud and grateful that they had helped me through it.
Classes began on January 13, 1992, and back in the classroom and into a routine, my emotional and physical recovery inched forward. As the spring of 1992 approached, I realized that I was destined to relive the uncertainty and turmoil of the summer and fall of 1991 all over again. After some consideration, I decided to decline all of the invitations to appear on talk shows. The usual format they followed did not lend itself to helpful discussion about the issue. My presence would have only made matters more volatile. Moreover, I was sure that the focus would be the politics of the nomination or the personalities of Judge Thomas and me. I wanted to talk about harassment. Of all the hosts, Phil Donahue and his producer seemed the most sensitive and open to a change in format. Whether out of self-consciousness or mistrust, I declined their invitation as well. Directly following the hearing, neither I nor the public was ready to discuss the issue rationally. Still, if only partly to refute the idea that I had become a recluse, in January I granted an interview to Ed Bradley of 60 Minutes. I had long admired his work, and he struck me as a sincere individual, less affected and more animated than most of his professional counterparts.