Speaking Truth to Power - Anita Hill [63]
All that Sunday, I tried to develop a plan to deal with the situation. None came to mind. Eric was my messenger, shuttling back and forth between the law school, my house, and the hotel. “The press is everywhere,” he told me. “Some are staying at this hotel.” Pointing to the law school logo on his sweatshirt, I warned, “Change clothes before you come back. Someone might spot you.” My words made me acutely aware of my predicament and the futility of remaining in the hotel. I could not believe any of it.
I was anxious, but not yet desperate. Eric and I prepared for our classes. Because I assumed that my schedule would continue uninterrupted, I even made an appointment to meet with my minister from Tulsa about a project he was working on later that week. Shirley came over to visit me late in the afternoon. I had a map of the hotel grounds, and from telephone calls coming into the law school, she provided the numbers of the rooms where press members were staying. Together we avoided journalists and went out to a track for our regular walk. It was a cool, crisp autumn evening, the best time of the year for one. And I needed to be out of the hotel room, if only temporarily. The press was so focused on sexual scandal that later certain reporters suggested I had spent the evening in a tryst with Shirley Wiegand—no doubt easier for some than admitting that I had simply eluded them under their very noses.
By Sunday evening I knew that I could not avoid the chaos that was to come. It was as if all summer long I had only been putting off the inevitable. My colleague Rick Tepker prepared a statement announcing that I would hold a press conference in the law school on Monday. I could barely read it, so unreal was the entire situation to me. Nevertheless, I signed off on it. I watched a local news report claiming that I had returned home that evening but fled upon seeing the press. The report had footage of a car driven by a black woman with black female passengers pulling into the driveway. Later I learned the occupants were law students playing a prank on the press. I ate dinner and went to bed. Amazingly, I managed to sleep for several hours.
For weeks and months after the hearing of October 1991, professional news analysts and commentators attempted to explain the intense anger that erupted because of the proceeding. In retrospect it is difficult to understand how the various emotions intensified so rapidly during the confirmation hearing. In a relatively short time, anger, confusion, disappointment, distrust, and more anger reached a boiling point, as people around the country focused on their televisions or radios to try to comprehend the spectacle which the process became. The hearing combined a variety of potentially volatile elements—gender, race, power, sex, and yes, politics—which when combined and subjected to the glare of television caused a mild explosion.
Memories of behavior which women had once had to “grin and bear” or at least go out of their way to avoid came back to us, and it no longer seemed right to dismiss them. By going back and looking at the entire record of the proceeding and the press accounts, one can begin to recall how the scene was set for the response. In fact, put in context, the intense emotional response was predictable, even natural.
I woke early Monday morning and returned home from the hotel just before daybreak to find one remaining crew of reporters camped on my neighbor’s lawn. They quickly crossed the street to mine. One member of a crew of three or four journalists carried a glaring light