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Authors: Anita Hill
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and supermarkets with abundant supplies of meat became popular and accessible, the slaughterhouse prospered. Even the glass jars produced at the local glass plant are, to me, associated with the rural lifestyle. Each rural household of which I was aware used countless numbers of fruit jars from July to September to put up the summer’s fruits and vegetables, jellies and jams. Once a flourishing industry and source of jobs, each year the plant employed fewer and fewer individuals. In 1994 the plant closed.
By the economic, social, and cultural standards of most Americans, the family of Albert and Erma Hill was poor. Yet I never knew it, for our lives were rich with family, friends, God, and nature. Even now, as I look back, I do not remember poverty, because we lacked the kinds of hopelessness and despair that choke many of the poor today. As I think of the family that entered the hearing in the Russell Senate Office Building on October 11, 1991, I see not only those present but those who came before us as well. Having lived through our struggles together in a life that was anything but easy, we expected adversity, and we expected to withstand it.
C HAPTER T WO
F or months after accepting the admission to Yale and sending in my deposit, I was 110 pounds of nervous energy. I don’t recall that my knees shook, but I remember lying awake wide-eyed many nights during the spring of 1977, wondering what it might be like.
In the summer of 1977, just before my twenty-first birthday, I traveled to Connecticut in preparation for my first semester at Yale Law School. I wanted to adjust to living in Connecticut before my classes started. I approached my first year of law school with the mingled anticipation and apprehension of a child about to receive her first bike. I had first become interested in law at age fifteen when I read in JoAnn’s sorority magazine that two of the women active in politics and the civil rights movement, Yvonne Burke and Patricia Harris, were lawyers. The images of the marchers and protesters influenced me as well. They were people who knew how cruel the law could be but believed so much in it that they were willing to die for changes in it. The civil rights movement and the people, lawyers and nonlawyers, in it inspired my belief in the law. My family and family friends had instilled in me a belief that I could actually achieve a law school education. But even at age twenty, as I readied myself for school, I had known only one lawyer personally. Nor had I ever spent more than two weeks outside the state of Oklahoma or crossed its border more than twice. For sixteen years of my life, I had not ventured more than 120 miles from our farm, and life in Stillwater duringcollege was almost an extension of my life on the farm. But now the distance offered by Yale was a daunting prospect.
Arriving in New Haven, I knew that my apprehension was justified. New Haven and Stillwater could not have been more foreign to one another. The first thing that I noticed was the cold. May in Connecticut felt more like March in Oklahoma. Not only was the temperature fifteen degrees lower, but it was measured with a Celsius thermometer—sparing me the satisfaction of protesting with absolute certainty just how much colder. In Stillwater I could look from the top floor of my dormitory and see beyond the edge of town to the surrounding pastures, miles across the flats. Neither trees nor buildings nor hills obstructed my view. New Haven, a small town by East Coast standards, stretched into endless suburbs—Woodbridge, West Haven, North Haven—and signs designating the various townships were the only lines of demarcation. In three years in New Haven I never found a vantage point that allowed me to see beyond the city boundaries to the countryside. I felt confined—able to escape only when time and finances allowed me to travel by train.
The Yale campus itself fulfilled my apprehension as well. Even the buildings were different.
By the economic, social, and cultural standards of most Americans, the family of Albert and Erma Hill was poor. Yet I never knew it, for our lives were rich with family, friends, God, and nature. Even now, as I look back, I do not remember poverty, because we lacked the kinds of hopelessness and despair that choke many of the poor today. As I think of the family that entered the hearing in the Russell Senate Office Building on October 11, 1991, I see not only those present but those who came before us as well. Having lived through our struggles together in a life that was anything but easy, we expected adversity, and we expected to withstand it.
C HAPTER T WO
F or months after accepting the admission to Yale and sending in my deposit, I was 110 pounds of nervous energy. I don’t recall that my knees shook, but I remember lying awake wide-eyed many nights during the spring of 1977, wondering what it might be like.
In the summer of 1977, just before my twenty-first birthday, I traveled to Connecticut in preparation for my first semester at Yale Law School. I wanted to adjust to living in Connecticut before my classes started. I approached my first year of law school with the mingled anticipation and apprehension of a child about to receive her first bike. I had first become interested in law at age fifteen when I read in JoAnn’s sorority magazine that two of the women active in politics and the civil rights movement, Yvonne Burke and Patricia Harris, were lawyers. The images of the marchers and protesters influenced me as well. They were people who knew how cruel the law could be but believed so much in it that they were willing to die for changes in it. The civil rights movement and the people, lawyers and nonlawyers, in it inspired my belief in the law. My family and family friends had instilled in me a belief that I could actually achieve a law school education. But even at age twenty, as I readied myself for school, I had known only one lawyer personally. Nor had I ever spent more than two weeks outside the state of Oklahoma or crossed its border more than twice. For sixteen years of my life, I had not ventured more than 120 miles from our farm, and life in Stillwater duringcollege was almost an extension of my life on the farm. But now the distance offered by Yale was a daunting prospect.
Arriving in New Haven, I knew that my apprehension was justified. New Haven and Stillwater could not have been more foreign to one another. The first thing that I noticed was the cold. May in Connecticut felt more like March in Oklahoma. Not only was the temperature fifteen degrees lower, but it was measured with a Celsius thermometer—sparing me the satisfaction of protesting with absolute certainty just how much colder. In Stillwater I could look from the top floor of my dormitory and see beyond the edge of town to the surrounding pastures, miles across the flats. Neither trees nor buildings nor hills obstructed my view. New Haven, a small town by East Coast standards, stretched into endless suburbs—Woodbridge, West Haven, North Haven—and signs designating the various townships were the only lines of demarcation. In three years in New Haven I never found a vantage point that allowed me to see beyond the city boundaries to the countryside. I felt confined—able to escape only when time and finances allowed me to travel by train.
The Yale campus itself fulfilled my apprehension as well. Even the buildings were different.
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