My Beloved World

by Sonia Sotomayor

  My experience of the antiwar protests was limited to the television screen. Though friends worried plenty about their luck in the draft lottery and Vietnam would come up as a topic in Forensics Club, debates weren’t boiling up spontaneously in the lunchroom. Cardinal Spellman, the archbishop of New York for whom my school was named, was also vicar to the armed forces and a fervent supporter of the war, spending Christmases in Vietnam with the troops. As the bombings escalated and spilled over into Cambodia and Laos, the protesters on the steps of St. Patrick’s Cathedral called it Spelly’s war. But the closest we had ever come to protesting at Cardinal Spellman High School was to lobby for a smoking room and the occasional no-uniform Friday.

  That’s not to say I didn’t understand the reasons underlying the cause, but raising voice and fist against Yale’s involvement in the war effort didn’t seem a smart way to prepare for an interview there. Instead, I went for a walk. The inner city of New Haven was impoverished then, depressed and threatening, no better than the South Bronx and a lot less lively. Actually, it made Co-op City seem idyllic.

  When my guides found me again, they were buzzing from the protest and eager for a rap session. We joined up with a larger group of Hispanic kids, some from New York, others from the Southwest, all of them more radical than anyone I had ever known before. For two days I camped in the dorm and scouted the campus in their company, listening to talk of revolution, Cuba, and Che Guevara and feeling generally uninformed. At least Fidel Castro was a familiar name, and news of the Cuban missile crisis had penetrated even the cocoon of my Catholic school childhood, where communism was deemed a godless threat, more cosmic than political. I could tell purgatory from limbo better than I could recognize the distinctions between socialism and communism that spurred the arguments during those two days at Yale. So embarrassed was I by my innocence that I would go to the library and read up on Che Guevara after I got home.

  I was embarrassed, too, by all the “down with whitey” talk. It wasn’t an attitude I shared, nor one I was eager to adopt. Many of my friends, most of my classmates, and virtually all of my teachers were white. Whether it was due to the indeterminate color of my skin or my very determined personality, I moved easily between different worlds without assuming disguises. Yes, I’d experienced prejudice aimed straight at me, from the blatant taunts of my street-fighting days to the cold shoulder of Kevin’s mom, to the subtler barb from the school nurse more recently. Of course I knew that the painful consequences of bigotry—then so common, even endemic—went far beyond the sting of being called a spic, as I had often been. But I couldn’t see such narrow-mindedness as the workings of systemic forces of history and certainly not as fitting neatly into a master narrative of perpetual class struggle, the way these Yale kids did. This stuff simply didn’t define me in any meaningful way: if somebody called me a spic, it told me a lot about them, but nothing about myself. And how could it help the situation to hurl a slur in reply?

  It was difficult to picture myself spending four years in this environment, especially with Kevin coming to visit on weekends. I left Yale thinking: not here—though I didn’t feel the same panicked urge to flee that I had felt at Radcliffe. Even if I didn’t share their attitudes, I knew where these kids were coming from, and when they talked of family and home, I recognized how much we did share.

  BY THE TIME I went to see Princeton, I was down to gathering loose change for bus fare, Amtrak now beyond my budget. When Kenny met me at the bus station, I was surprised to see his hair grown very long, an expression of his new freedom. We dropped my bag at his dorm before heading out to tour the campus.

  As we entered the main gates from Nassau Street, the sunlight on that balmy spring day danced magically on the sandy Collegiate Gothic architecture and the emerald lawns and the surrounding woodlands, a prospect that has enchanted generations of Princeton students but that took me completely unprepared. Even the bronze tigers flanking the entrance to ivy-covered Nassau Hall, while reminding me of the stone lions that guard the New York Public Library, seemed more pensive and more elegant.

  Kenny had gathered a very small group of friends. Like him, they were exceptionally bright but slightly offbeat inner-city kids, radical in their politics, though quietly so, who conducted their lives at arm’s length from Princeton’s preppy mainstream. We sat up late together in a dorm room that night, talking easily. “Socially, it’s a wasteland here,” Kenny said, his judgment affirmed by solemn nods from the other freshmen. “It’s a bunch of very strange, privileged human beings, and you’re not going to understand any of them. But intellectually, you can deal with these people. They’re not that smart.” Nobody seemed to mind, or even notice, that I didn’t join in when the pipe was passed. I didn’t feel a need to make excuses or explain about being diabetic. This group was mellow through and through.

  At my interview the next morning I felt just as comfortable chatting with the admissions officer in his tiny corner office. He was professorially tweedy, down to his leather elbow patches and little horn-rimmed glasses, but he was open and easy to talk to.

  Before the weekend was over, my decision was firm. A full scholarship capped it.

  I didn’t begin to understand the power of those Ivy names Kenny had first disclosed to me until I saw the reactions of people when they learned that I was headed to Princeton. Prospect Hospital was abuzz with the news, and all day long the staff—not just the nurses and orderlies, but the doctors too—were popping into the business office: “Congratulations! Sonia, how wonderful! We’re so proud of you!” All those women I had spent long summer lunch hours with in the cafeteria over card games and surprisingly good roast chicken as soap operas droned in the background and the women shared their own incrementally unfolding family dramas—they all came to give me a hug. Mr. Reuben, the comptroller, who had never been thrilled to have a kid working in the office, softened his habitual scowl. Even Dr. Freedman, who owned the hospital and who had overridden Mr. Reuben’s objections when I asked for a job more challenging than candy striper, stopped by just to join the well-wishers. All this left me a little shaken. Other kids had gotten into college too. I had certainly expected to. Was Princeton really so special?

  WHEN, at the end of summer, it finally came time to say good-bye, the women at the hospital had taken up a collection. “Sonia, go buy yourself some new shoes for college. Please!”

  “But these shoes are comfortable,” I said, my usual line. It wasn’t the first time they had begged me to upgrade my footwear. My feet blistered easily in new shoes, so once I had broken in a pair, I would never give them up. Everyone in the office had heard me on the phone defending my raggedy shoes to my grandmother. “Buy some new shoes already! Make your grandmother happy” was an old story. New shoes for college was just the latest twist.

  On Kenny’s advice, I planned to get a bicycle once I got to Princeton. The only other purchase he advised was a raincoat. Mami offered to buy it and came shopping with me. We searched up and down Fordham Road without finding anything I liked. We even stepped into Loehmann’s, my first time there. Though it was a discount house, and popular in Co-op City, the prices, to us, were a shock. So we went—where else?—to La Tercera, the Latino shopping heart of the South Bronx on Third Avenue.

  No luck at Alexander’s. I wasn’t being fussy; I was just having a hard time picturing myself in that magical land of archways and manicured lawns wearing anything I saw on these racks. On the other side of the street, which was divided by the elevated train line rumbling overhead, were the slightly more upscale dress shops, places where you might shop for a wedding or some other very special occasion. In this case, a last resort.

  There it was: glowing white with toggle buttons and a subtle flair of fake fur trim up the front and around the hood. As improbably white as a white couch, white as a blanket of snow on a college lawn.

  “You like it, Sonia?”

  “I love it, Mami.” This was another first. Unlike my mother, or Chiqui, or my cousin Miriam
, or many of my friends, I’d never cared enough to fall in love with a garment. But wrapped in this, I knew I wouldn’t feel so odd. Unfortunately, it was a size too small. I tried on a couple of other coats, but my heart had been claimed, and Mami knew it.

  I was ready to leave and try elsewhere, but she said, “Espera … Sonia, wait, maybe they can order it.” She went to the counter and waited in silence as the saleswoman helped another customer. And then another and another. My mother is a very patient woman, so I knew what it took for her to finally say, “Miss, I need help.”

  “What do you want?” she snapped without turning.

  “Do you have this in a twelve?”

  “If it’s not on the rack, we don’t have it.”

  “Do you have another store? Can you order it?”

  The woman finally turned and looked at her. “Well, that would be a lot of trouble, wouldn’t it?”

  I was halfway to the door, fully expecting my mother to give up, but she stood her ground. “I know it’s a lot of trouble, but my daughter’s going away to college and she likes this coat. I want to give it to her as a gift. So would you please look to see if you can find this coat for my daughter.”

  Her silent shrug spoke loudly enough: You’re a pain in the ass. But as she turned away, she asked indifferently, “So where’s she going to college?”

  “To Princeton.”

  I saw the saleswoman’s head swing round as in a cartoon double take. The transformation was remarkable. She was suddenly all courtesy and respect, full of praise for Princeton, and more than happy to make a phone call in search of my coat, which, as it turned out, would arrive in a week. Mami thanked her profusely and left a deposit. It was a lot of money, but that coat would last me all four years of college. It had to.

  As we were walking back to the station, I commented on the saleswoman’s change of attitude. My mother stopped in the shadow of the elevated track and said to me, “I have to tell you, Sonia, at the hospital I’m being treated like a queen right now. Doctors who have never once had a nice word for me, who have never spoken to me at all, have come up to congratulate me.”

  Overhead, the train rumbled loudly, and I had to pause for a long moment before I admitted that I had never dreamed what a difference Princeton would make to people.

  She looked at me steadily. “What you got yourself into, daughter, I don’t know. But we’re going to find out.”

  Fifteen

  IN THE WEEK since Alfred drove off with Mami waving good-bye out the window, a look of doom overcoming her firm-set jaw, the collegiate fairy tale in my mind was becoming something more akin to science fiction. In part it was the record-breaking heat that summer of 1972, which silvered Princeton’s leafy vistas, endowing everything with a more unearthly aura than I had remembered. But I was also finding that many of my classmates seemed to come from another planet and that that impression was reciprocated.

  Waiting outside Dillon Gym, where we were to meet our advisers, I struck up a conversation with another freshman sitting beside me. She was from Alabama, she said. I had never before heard an accent like that in real life. I listened spellbound as she explained how her father, her grandfather, and her elder brother were all Princeton alums. She couldn’t have been more delighted to be there representing her generation. “And it really is just the friendliest, most welcoming place you’ll find,” she gushed. “I mean, look at all the unusual people that come here!” She was indicating an approaching pair, their heads together, laughing loudly.

  I recognized my roommate, Dolores, and our friend Teresa. Dolores was vaguely Mexican looking, with light brown skin and Indian-black hair. Teresa was barely a shade darker than I am, hardly dark at all, but her features were distinctively Latina. They both looked pretty normal to me. Without premeditation, I greeted them exuberantly in rapid-fire Spanish, though we usually spoke English together. I meant no malice toward the girl from Alabama, but my pulse was speeding with a sense of purpose. Nothing more needed to be said.

  Dolores Chavez was from New Mexico. We must have been assigned to room together because someone had assumed two Hispanics would have a lot in common. But all Dolores knew of Puerto Ricans came from West Side Story, and I suspect that initially she was half afraid I’d knife her in her sleep. I knew even less of New Mexico than she knew of New York. Dolores seemed to me a country girl, sweet-tempered, shy, and very far from home. One night soon after we’d arrived, she got her guitar out and sang softly for a while before we went to sleep, such deep longing in her voice.

  As social as I am, I was quiet in those early days, trying to make sense of the conversations flowing around me. One evening, I found myself with a group of girls sitting in our resident adviser’s dorm room. One of them mentioned being invited to a wedding and that she’d decided just to choose a gift from the bridal registry. What the hell is a bridal registry? I wondered. Our adviser, a senior, allowed that her father sometimes received wedding invitations from people whose names he didn’t even recognize, probably strangers hoping he would blame his memory and send a gift anyway, she figured. Who invites strangers to their wedding? For that matter, who sends them gifts? Where I came from, you handed the couple an envelope with money at the reception. Were people here so rich they could afford a wedding without gifts of cash?

  Whenever I felt out of place or homesick, I took refuge at Firestone Library. Books had seen me through an earlier time of trouble, and their presence all around me was both a comfort and an answer to the question of why I had come here. From my first day on campus, I’d enviously eyed the carrels in Firestone, which were reserved for upper-classmen. One day, one of those would be mine! Meanwhile, I reveled in the vastness of the main catalog room, riffling through the drawers full of cards, rows and rows of cabinets running almost the full length of the ground floor. And above them, like cathedral spires, rose the stacks, shelf after shelf, carrying a book for every card below, books ranging in subject from the majestic to the comically arcane. Here, in one of the world’s great libraries, was my first exposure to the true breadth of human knowledge, the humbling immensity of what was known and thought, of which my days spent pawing the Encyclopaedia Britannica had offered only a foretaste.

  My grazing in Firestone that first week was not at random, however. The course offerings at Princeton seemed a bewildering buffet: so many unfamiliar subjects that whet my appetite. I dug into the library catalog to get a taste of each subject that tempted me before committing to a whole meal. At the same time, I was already well aware that in our freshman class, some, like me, were far fresher than others. Many from across the United States and abroad had gone to high schools that sounded more like mini-colleges, with library buildings of their own and sophisticated electives. I had made it into Princeton but, in this way too, with far more meager resources than most. I was under no illusions about how much remedial education could be accomplished skimming a few books in the stacks.

  That there was no official pre-law curriculum turned out to be a blessing of sorts. I had to decide for myself what would be the most useful way to fill in the wide blank areas in my understanding. Having negligible prior knowledge of practically everything, I planned with each course to gulp down as much as I could. And so introductory surveys seemed ideal. I was drawn to psychology and sociology, having always been interested in the patterns of individual behavior, as well as the structure of communities; history, especially American, seemed essential and promised to reveal how a larger scheme of things had developed over time. Moral philosophy sounded a lot like what I imagined legal reasoning to involve. And just from reading the newspaper since entering Spellman, I knew that one day I would need to grapple with economics. An art history survey seemed like just the way to answer the many questions that had lapped at my mind since my childhood visit to the Ponce museum. But I would err on the side of practicality for now, saving that one for a sophomore treat.

  My adviser approved my course load without question, and I felt I was on my way. B
ut back at the dorm, deflation awaited. Everyone had returned from taking care of the same business, and the freshman floor was abuzz with talk of exotic upper-level courses my classmates were taking thanks to their Advanced Placement work in high school, which had allowed them to leapfrog ahead. By comparison, my course selections sounded boring, even lazy. Was I squandering an opportunity to really challenge myself? Maybe I just wasn’t as smart as they were?

  That tide of insecurity would come in and out over the years, sometimes stranding me for a while but occasionally lifting me just beyond what I thought I could accomplish. Either way, it would wash over the same bedrock certainty: ultimately, I know myself. At each stage of my life, I’ve had a pretty clear notion of my needs and of what I was ready for. There would be time enough in those four years at Princeton to sample Chinese Politics and Roman Law, to delve into Social Disorganization, Crime, and Deviant Behavior. Meanwhile, the introductory surveys would involve just as much work, given their broad scope, as more specialized advanced courses and would allow me for the first time to cultivate the critical faculties that Miss Katz had tried to instill: understanding the world by engaging with its big questions rather than just absorbing the factual particulars. This was the way to be a student of anything, and learning it has served me ever since. As a lawyer and even more as a judge, I would often be called upon to make myself a temporary expert in some field for the duration of a case. From the sciences to technology to the arts, the variety of industries and other endeavors that come before the courts is vast, and often there is no determining how the law applies without a working knowledge of the field in question.

  I still had to choose a science lab course to meet a core requirement. Those in the natural sciences were known to be backbreakers, requiring a share of one’s waking hours more appropriate for a pre-med or a budding scientist than an aspiring lawyer. I did notice, however, that Introductory Psychology included a lab that met the need. An introduction to Freud and other schools of thought, as well as an overview of brain function, seemed as if it might prove very handy over time. There was only one challenge to overcome, but one far more daunting than any rigors of organic chemistry or molecular biology labs: rats.