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By Root 901 0

at the end of three years or four or five, for some it was now six and seven. It might have made a more aggressive group cutthroat and competitive, but not UNC English graduate students. We were complacent in the way that gentlemen are complacent—not in any way lazy, but civil to the point of inaction sometimes. And some were content that our bleak prospects allowed us entry into high emotion, even if the high emotion was despair. We had all been children of promise, and now we found ourselves imprisoned in a lovely garden of a town from which we could find no exit. So we didn’t really try to exit; we tried to create for ourselves a place of civility and purpose, which was, I think now, really always out of our reach. But maybe the reaching for it taught us how to create that decency when we did finally manage to—and this is too harsh a word—escape.

I started graduate school at UNC in 1971 in a program in which I would go straight to a doctorate, bypassing a master’s degree. It sounds more prestigious than it was. For me it was economics. I was borrowing money all the time to pay for school, and I didn’t want to slow down to write a master’s thesis. After our first year, we played the most erudite games of charades ever played as some studied for the master’s writtens. We even had to come up with a special hand gesture to designate that we were acting out the name of a poem. There were “conversations” in which every word spoken was a line from a different Shakespearean play. We did it because we could, but the intellectual pursuit, which meant so much to each of us, was tainted for me by the manic effort to make this lovely treading water seem important. It was like a mockery of gaiety, like a mockery of life. We all knew, but we had no choice.

I decided I had a choice. I didn’t want to keep piecing together loans and tips from waitressing so that I could keep working on a degree that would never result in the job I wanted. In some ways, waitressing itself was more satisfactory. “Mom” of Mom’s and Pop’s Restaurant told me I was a born waitress, certain, I am sure, that this was encouragement to an English graduate student. At the Pines, where I waitressed next, Leroy Merritt had quite a different idea about waitresses. He saw us as an elegant waitstaff, never hurried, never really in need of tips—which drove the women who were trying to live on tips to distraction. For all the menial parts of waitressing, it was—unlike the Shakespearean conversations of graduate school—real in a way that graduate school might have been real had it been for more of us a path to the profession we had hoped it would be. In waitressing, what I saw is what I got. Work hard six hours, then go home tired with a pocketful of quarters. Unlike graduate school, if I did my part, it did not disappoint.

By the end of my second year, I’d made the decision to go to law school. My mother had always wanted me to go; she said I was argumentative. I don’t think that distinguished me as a daughter, but I decided to follow her advice nonetheless. The transition was easy, for I wasn’t leaving the lovely garden. I would go to law school in Chapel Hill. My friend Errol wrote of Chapel Hill that everything smells of life and the air is abuzz as if it had just sifted down from heaven. Nothing quite like it.

Law school was not, as I had expected and hoped, real life. People talked more about what was happening around us than they had in graduate school. But with the exception of a table of veterans who played cards together in the student lounge, there was pretty much unanimity about the war, about equal rights for women—starting, it turned out, with trying to find space for an adequate women’s bathroom on the main floor. The small contingent of women law students started a group called Women in Law, to address issues such as bathrooms and matters of more importance, such as equal employment opportunities. The veterans countered with Veterans in Law. But it was not as contentious as it sounds. The conflicts were generally pedestrian. The biggest disagreement occurred