Wading in High Cotton
The world I left and the world I found when I reentered through the law school.
Can you even imagine? I moved into student housing at the University of North Dakota with law school starting in a couple of weeks when I learned that one-third of the class before mine had flunked out.
Holy shit! This was a piece of information to carry around. I had given up a perfectly good job teaching high school English that would be hard to replace. Andrew was age 5 and starting kindergarten; Christine was age 11 and going into the fifth grade. I was 38.
One thing I totally needed to do was get my income up. Law school was not a new interest for me. Years before, when I was 18, I stood in the registrar’s office at Minot State Teachers College, Minot, ND, catalog in hand, inquiring about the law program. “Oh, my dear,” is how the person began explaining to the hayseed before her just how it was that law was not in the MSTC catalog.
I worked for a juke box company in Minot, changing records and counting money throughout my MSTC days. My bosses were a husband-wife team, Jim and Essie Sampson. More than once, Jim recalled that I looked like something a cat had dragged in when they hired me. “Oh, Jimmy,” Essie would say. “How can you say such a thing?” “Now, Ess,” Jim would say, “You remember I said it at the time. I said, ‘She looks like something a cat dragged in right off the streets!’” They needed typing speed way more than accuracy. I was able to give them the speed, though the accuracy remains around the same level some 65 years later. Why typing? We knew the name of every record in every slot in our juke boxes and the number of times each was played. The typed sheets were popped into little notebooks and updated when records were changed. High players stayed, low players came off.
It was a great job. Juke boxes were in their heyday, and it was a world away from the college. Typically, I would have enough money by the end of the second week in a quarter to buy my books; I would skip school and lie about it one day a month for the “Montana run.” Montana was a 24-hour trip. I would make the trip with a mechanic for any trouble shooting, and we’d return in the wee hours with bags of money in the trunk of the red Lincoln road car. Wide-eyed, I changed records on “High Third,” the street a product of Prohibition, later known for its after-hours alcohol, illegal gambling and prostitution — and owners in and out of prison. It put Minot on the map and provided the material, substantially scrubbed, for my sociology term paper.
English teachers were in demand across the country, so I headed for the nearest high school wherever I happened to be and went to work. But the world changed, and by the time of my divorce, there was an over-supply. I did find work at a neat high school, and the day came when I learned there was a woman going to the University of North Dakota School of Law with two kids. I had trouble believing it, much less thinking I could emulate her. Within a few days I started the process: application for admission, Law School Admission Test, move to Grand Forks, ND. You know the drill.
So, there we were. Orientation. First day of law school, year one of three, 1L, 2L, 3L. I was unemployed, with my beautiful Christine and Andrew beside me as we walked the block together before the kids cut over to the sitter. The law program was in the by God UND catalog. Andrew grabbed my hand. “You scared, Mom?” he asked. The children had heard my nonstop wails over the third of the class that flunked out. They knew I had told my neighbor Jared, also a 1L, who said, “That’s ok. I’m not scared of a little competition!” Oh, how I envied his confidence! (Shades of Ben Franklin! It was a little scenario that has served me well. Ordinarily well-groomed and dressed, his touted confidence in shambles, Jared was not able to manage either as we moved into finals.)
I was at the beginning of numbers of women at the law school — 15 out of 90. I counted as people left for various reasons, with the notion I would surely be among the 30 statistically destined to be GONE. But the profs and the courses! It was an incredible experience. Not since Humanities, and let’s say Shakespeare, at MSTC did I have anything close. Constitutional Law, Civil Procedure, Evidence, Federal Courts — it was the most interesting stuff in the world. I hardly thought of anything else.
There was Legal Writing, where the prof tossed (tossed!) his navy blazer onto a table near me, label out: Yves Saint Laurent. I had a thought he wanted us to see the label, wanted us to know what we were dealing with. But my far bigger thought was that here was proof positive I could get my income up through law school. I got my Legal Memorandum back on a Friday: “Do Over.” My classmates seemed bewildered, sympathetic; no one else had a do over. What the hell? I kicked through the beautful red and gold and brown fall leaves to home. I spent Saturday, with so much else to do, trying to address the comments on my Memo and calculating where I was in the one-third destined to go, but I knew. I knew.
Early on during 1L, I was swabbing a toilet, and it hit me that I was thinking about equal protection under the law. Life has gotta be good, don’t you think, when you can be thinking about the Fourteenth Amendment and cleaning a toilet?
Why, pray tell, would anyone think about anything else? The Equal Protection Clause is part of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution. This is what it says:
“All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”
The concept, the law, of Equal Protection was second in my mind only to the 30 expected flunk outs, which I was still counting — flunk outs, drop outs. When would I be next? The fear, and the counting, however, were beginning to fade — aided, no doubt, by landing one of three A’s in Constitutional Law that first semester. It was, said one of my female classmates, what made me at the law school. The final exam included an equal protection question, or at least I thought it did because, well, doesn’t everything?
Once I knew I could stay, long before I got the D in 3L, I settled into the place. I would sit in the big classes, somewhere between 60 and 90 people, and think that I was not likely ever again to be among this density (only the one meaning, please!) of intellect and wit for such a long stretch of time. Some 45 years later, I know that to be true.
What about the children? When it was -20 below, I would drop them off at school a 7:30 a.m., where they sat on the floor in a hallway for about an hour before school began. I still get a knot in my stomach when I think of Christine, home by herself with pneumonia and not just once, because I could not skip class and stay afloat. A plus was that I was home evenings and they could interrupt my studies freely, unless we were into finals. Many days dinner awaited in the slow cooker when we got home.
Christine was a great one for grabbing the vacuum cleaner. She pleaded to be permitted to scrub floors — high learning curve on that one! I promised her in appreciation that I would cook her meals and scrub her floors when she was in school, but she was in Boston and then Lafayette, IN, and it never happened. Give me a break! Ray Charles — who took Black music into the mainstream in my juke box days — was in Tanglewood — two and a half hours due west of Boston. Nothing else even crossed our minds.
My grandson and I did clean Christine’s cupboards a few years ago, if that counts.
Andrew was age 11 when he asked me, “Do you know what the best years of my life were?” OK, he’s 11. Let’s talk about it. “They were,” he said, “the law school years.” He said he liked the people and the places we went. My 1L study group met at our place; one of my classmates gave Christine guitar lessons. He liked that I decided yes, Goblin the Cat would join our family. I had been pursuaded by Christine’s argument about how she tended stuff. Many Saturday nights we went out for pizza or burritos. We would trudge through snow to the Burtness Theater; Andrew was in The Nutcracker with the Atlanta Ballet Company.
There was Cora, a dear friend 30 years older than I, who lived near UND campus, about a block and a half away from us. She would find her days too quiet and invite Christine and Andrew for a Saturday; they were indeed the antidote. I would go to the law library and join them for Lawrence Welk (!) and dinner; we took the leftovers home. One day Andrew went to Cora’s to walk with her to our home; he suggested a shortcut. They arrived with Cora exhausted, her boots full of snow. She had slogged through snow up to her knees, while the small boy tripping along on top of the snow gave her encouragement: “C’mon, Cora! You can make it!”
From a nun Andrew learned calligraphy, $1 a lesson, and became quite good at it. He also learned that he was precluded from becoming a nun by both religion and gender. Within a day, he was saddened on the same subject by a sign in the window of a little gas station restaurant: “WAITRESS WANTED.” Did that mean they hired only girls?” How can all this be?
He took on the professor who gave me the aforementioned D in 3L. They had climbed into neighboring chairs at the Student Union barber shop. As Andrew told me, and the prof affirmed, Andrew looked over at him: “Are you Professor Lamb?” He was. “Are you the one who gave my mother a D?” The barber shop was full and listening; everyone now knew, said Professor Lamb, about my sorry academic record. So thankful the D did not occur in 1L. As it was, it gave me a ton of perspective even as it knocked me off the dean’s list.
Graduation Day came, and I was pushed out of the law school. I didn’t actually enjoy the time of practicing divorce law — the middle-of-the-night call with the slurred accusation, “You don’t care, do you, if she runs around with every Tom, Dick, and Harry?” And surely there was a hyped gender bias compared to what I had experienced before. I was at a seminar where chills ran up my spine when the Fourth Amendment — Search and Seizure — flashed onto a screen at the front of the room. How then, do I answer the question at lunch from a judge who simply wants to know why “someone like you” would want to attend a seminar like that one?
But! There was one question that I did know how to answer. Early on, I was appointed county court magistrate and small claims court referee by the County Court Judge. The appointment required the approval of the Board of County Commissioners, and the judge told me long after that he had told them he was sending over one name only and it would be a woman. There was no woman serving in any judicial capacity in North Dakota at the time, and only one or two ever before, and the judge told me he felt they needed a bit of time to acclimate themselves to the idea. At hearing within a few days of my appointment, one of the lawyers appearing before me asked what I wanted them to call me. To my great satisfaction, I knew the answer: “Your Honor would be fine,” I said.
I had to find a job that included health insurance, did not mean doing divorces, and insulated me from much of the gender stuff, both jokey and other, and I did. If something that was going on — a movie, conversation, whatever — didn’t interest me enough, it was a short step to a reverie where I mulled the next motion, the next brief, the next evidentiary problem. I hugged the rules because I didn’t get the slack I saw cut for the guys.
Going to law school was the best thing I ever did. I continue to view the world through the law school prism. I read and listen, read and listen. How is it that the teaching of history, anemic at all levels, has sufficed with the Equal Protection Clause at our elbows? How in hell can we still be unsure of voting rights in the USofA?
I never rounded the curve in the hall to the North Dakota Supreme Court for oral argument without that old Southern expression, “You’re wading in mighty high cotton for a country girl like you,” crossing my mind. Shortly before Andrew graduated magna cum laude from the University of North Dakota, he called me: “I saw Professor Lamb crossing the campus today.” The silence that followed sparked. Finally, I got out, “You didn’t!” “Oh, yes,” he said with good cheer. “I asked him how it was that he gave my mother a D.” Christine has what is by now a well-worn Ph.D. Neither of them ever looked for the law program in a college catalog.
-End- (Names have been changed except for Cora and my children, Christine and Andrew.)
