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By Root 790 0

it. I had for all I knew put it behind me for all time. As painful and unfair as it was, the Thomas episodes, like the racist hostility at Oral Roberts and later at Oklahoma, were something in my life that I’d had to rise above in order to move forward. I refused to wallow in these experiences or punish myself because of them. I rarely talked about them. Perhaps wrongly, I wouldn’t even try to make those responsible for the behavior accountable in any way. In that sense, I share some of the responsibility for its perpetuation. For my own benefit, however, I only wanted to move beyond it. It was not that I ever forgot what had happened, or even that I work very hard to forget; I had simply convinced myself that what mattered was my right to not cling too tightly to the hurt, and to move on with my life.

CHAPTER FIVE

Norman, Oklahoma, and Washington, D.C., have one thing in common: dreadfully hot summers. In Washington the humidity hangs in the air like a thick clear fog, routinely threatening thunderstorms. The result is a lush green environment that is mildly oppressive by August, the hottest month. In Oklahoma, however, summer begins in May. The humidity hovers, only rarely turning into rain. And by summer’s end in Oklahoma, grass and shrubs are parched and withered.

I do not like the heat. By mid-July I am out of sorts. I pant from air-conditioned home to air-conditioned car to air-conditioned office in the morning, and in the evening I reverse the routine. I wonder how I managed all those un-air-conditioned years in the fields and at home. I remember how I looked forward to visits to my cousins, whose big cooler bellowed water-saturated air into their family room. I delighted in the temperature of that room until it was time to go home, where the only respite was the night breeze through an open window.

The summer of 1991 was a difficult one for me even before the temperature reached one hundred degrees. I was suffering from a medical condition that seems to run in my family. My uterus was covered with tumors that caused me considerable pain and discomfort. Each day I would rise to moderate pain that increased as the day wore on. I have an even stronger aversion to medication than to heat—even over-the-counter medication—but some days the pain was such that I would take the anti-inflammatory pain relievers my doctor prescribed. Since these had side effects, I would try to manage without them when I could.

On the morning of July 1, 1991, like most lawyers in the country, I waited in anticipation of the president’s announcement of his choice to replace Justice Thurgood Marshall on the Supreme Court. The White House had circulated a number of names as potential nominees. Political commentators, in the business of speculating about such things, were predicting that President George Bush would name a Hispanic judge to succeed Justice Marshall. Prominent among the possibilities floated were Judges Ricardo H. Hinjosa and Emilio M. Garza, both of the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, and Judge Ferdinand F. Fernandez of the Ninth Circuit, all Reagan appointees with solid Republican credentials. Judge Jose Cabranes of the Second Circuit was the only Carter appointee under consideration, and Judge Clarence Thomas of the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals was the only African American. Two white women, Judges Edith Jones of the Fifth Circuit and Pamela Rhymer of the Ninth Circuit, were reportedly on the list too, along with two white males, Kenneth Starr, the solicitor general, and Judge Patrick Higginbotham of the Fifth Circuit.

The New York Times reported that television journalists were declaring forty-three-year-old Judge Garza the front-runner. Compared to some of the others under consideration, Judge Garza had limited experience on the court of appeals, having been appointed early in 1991, from a federal district judgeship he had taken in 1988. However, he had more overall federal judicial experience than Thomas, also forty-three, who had only been appointed to the court of appeals in 1990.

Amid all the speculation,