My Beloved World

by Sonia Sotomayor

  We wagered a trip to Puerto Rico and shook hands on the stupidest wager I’d ever heard of: The winner would be the bigger loser. If she passed the exams, she would buy me a plane ticket. If she failed, I would pay for her trip.

  I don’t know if the bet was reverse psychology or a perverse good luck charm, but it seemed to steady her resolve. In the end, of course, I won: my mother passed all five of her qualifying exams on the first try, which doesn’t happen very often.

  ——

  LATE IN THE FALL SEMESTER of my sophomore year, I sensed that something wasn’t right. For two weeks in a row, no envelope had arrived in the mail. I was worried and phoned my mother: “Where’s Abuelita? Why haven’t I heard from her?”

  There was a long silence before Mami finally spoke. A tone of blustering hesitation in her voice told me that I was the last to hear the news. No one had the courage to tell me. Abuelita was in the hospital, at Flower–Fifth Avenue. She had ovarian cancer. Like so many older women, she had stopped seeing a gynecologist long before. She thought—and she was sadly wrong, I want to stress—that routine checkups were pointless since she was past having children. And so the cancer was far advanced when they found it. I was ready to get on the next bus, but Mami said, “No, wait till you come for Christmas. Hopefully, she’ll be home by then.”

  That was a few weeks away. I had no experience with cancer of any kind then, no point of reference, no way to guess at how serious it might be. All I knew was that winter had set in and the sky hung lower with each passing day.

  By the time I got there, Abuelita was delirious and hallucinating. I spent the days at her side, just being there, studying while she slept. Aunts and uncles and cousins squeezed into her hospital room, and then at some point on Christmas Eve the crowd vanished. People were anxious because the oil embargo meant hour-long lines at every gas station and they needed to fill up before the pumps closed for the holiday. Titi Gloria said, “Come, you’ll get stuck here.” My cousin Charlie and I looked at each other: no way were we leaving.

  We decided to go get a Christmas tree for Abuelita; Charlie was the one who always decorated her apartment for the holidays, just as I had done our tree ever since Papi died. It started to snow as we walked down Lexington Avenue in the fading light. We’d gone all the way to Ninety-Sixth Street before finding a florist that was open. We picked out a small tabletop tree that was beautifully decorated and took turns carrying it back, our hands freezing. The snow was already sticking; it was that cold.

  “Do you remember …?” The whole way there and back, Charlie talked. His voice is gentle, musical; just the sound of it was a comfort. He had so many memories of Abuelita, many from before I was even born. He was very close to Gallego too and had stories to tell from when they all lived in Puerto Rico, some he’d heard others tell. When Abuelita was just twelve years old, the parish priest in Manatí recognized that she could heal people who were suffering mentally. He used to bring her to the asylum to exorcise their demons. She couldn’t help with physical ailments, but if an unclean spirit possessed someone’s mind, she could order it to leave. Even the patients she couldn’t cure found a sense of peace in her presence.

  Charlie has always had complete faith in Abuelita’s spiritual powers. I’m too rational for that. You don’t need to credit any superstition to feel how Abuelita protected the people she loved. Charlie confided in me a particular experience, his eyes getting bigger and bigger as he told the tale: One time, he had walked his girlfriend home to her place in Brooklyn, only to fall asleep on the train back up to the Bronx. Suddenly he woke, the sound of Abuelita’s voice calling to him urgently, and he jumped off at the next station, just in time for the doors to close on three men who were about to mug him. The next day he saw Abuelita in person, and without any prompt the first thing she said was that he’d better give up that girl in Brooklyn!

  Her fierce protectiveness also showed itself in ways that had nothing to do with spirits. She was wildly jealous of Gallego. Once at a party, he was dancing a slow merengue with the wrong woman. Abuelita grabbed the record from the Victrola and smashed it on the floor; then she kicked off her shoes and chased the woman down the stairs screaming. That was before my time, but I can imagine it easily. Mercedes was famously impulsive: joyrides at midnight, picnics on the highway median …

  At her bedside, Charlie was trying to feed Abuelita a few spoonfuls of Jell-O, but she wouldn’t take any. She kept asking for her clothes, as if she were going home. I was sitting in the chair by the door, and she looked right through me, talking to someone who wasn’t there. “Angelina,” she said. A chill went down my spine. I recognized the name: her sister, who’d passed away years ago. Charlie left the room for some reason, and then Abuelita said to me, “Sonia, dame un cigarrillo.”

  It was the first time she’d said my name since I’d arrived from Princeton. “Abuelita, this is a hospital,” I said gently, hating to deny her. “You can’t smoke in here.”

  She said it again, imperiously: “Sonia, give me a cigarette!” The voice of the matriarch. I found my purse, pulled out a cigarette, lit it. I held it to her lips. She took a puff and gave a little cough. Then, as I watched, the life left her face.

  I gave her a hug. “Bendición, Abuelita.” And then I yelled for the nurse. People came running, shooed me out of the room. It was just as well. I didn’t go back in. I needed to be alone.

  At the funeral, Charlie in his grief assumed an irrational added burden of guilt. He remembered Abuelita’s having told him the year before that she wouldn’t live to see another Christmas. “We should never have bought that tree, Sonia,” he said, shaking his head. “We should have kept Christmas out of that room.” My own sorrow flared into rage when I saw Nelson appear briefly, a spectral presence on the fringe of the mourners. I hadn’t set eyes on him for three years, and now here he was, nodding in a doped-up daze. It was disrespectful of him to show up in that state, I fumed in silence. And it was desperately sad, sadder than I could bear just then. Nelson had got himself addicted to heroin while he was still in high school and then flunked out of half a dozen colleges while his father refused to accept the reality right before his eyes. His test scores were stellar, off the charts, so he’d get in the door easily enough, but he couldn’t bring himself to show up for class or do the work. He slipped away from the funeral before we could say anything to each other, and I wouldn’t see him again for several more years.

  In the weeks that followed, I understood for the first time Abuelita’s devastation when Papi died, how it had cut into her spirit. Her death did the same to me. A piece of me perilously close to my heart had been amputated. The sense of loss was startling, physically disorienting. It occurs to me that Flower–Fifth Avenue is the same hospital where I was born. “Full circle” is the phrase that pops into my mind, as if we were one person. “Mercedes chiquita.” I can still hear her voice sometimes, all these years later. “Don’t worry, mi’jita,” she says, and I feel her protection.

  Seventeen

  I MET MARGARITA ROSA a few weeks after arriving at Princeton, and we soon became fast friends. Coming from a poor neighborhood of Brooklyn and a traditionally conservative Puerto Rican family herself, Margarita understood instinctively the path I had traveled to Princeton. We rarely needed to talk about the incongruities of our being there, and so our rapport progressed quickly to more urgent matters.

  “Three guys for every girl, and I can’t get a date! What’s wrong with this picture?”

  “Don’t take it personally,” I’d say. “They didn’t want to let women in the door, and now that we’re here, they don’t know what to do with us.” Princeton had turned coed just three years before, and the presence of women on campus was still a thorn in the side of many old-school diehards.

  “Not true, Sonia. If you’re a blue-eyed blonde, they know what to do with you. If you’re black, there’s at least a handful of brothers ready to stand up and say you’re as beautiful as they are. But a café-con-leche Lati
na with a ’fro? That they don’t know what to do with.”

  Margarita’s tough luck with men mystified me. To my eyes, she was indeed attractive, petite, and lively, as well as being eloquent and passionate about making the world a better place. She was a junior when I was a freshman, and I could only hope to become like her.

  “At least you don’t have a pudgy nose,” I offered.

  “At least you’ve got Kevin,” she returned.

  We often studied at Firestone Library until closing time, when we would walk back to the dorms together. About once a week, before going home, we would stop off at the pub to continue the conversation over a glass of sangria and a slice of pizza. Margarita was pushing me to join Acción Puertorriqueña, the Latino student group that she was involved in, and I was pushing back. It was no reflection on the group; nor was I being standoffish. I just wasn’t inclined to join anything until I’d gathered my bearings and felt more comfortable with my course load.

  I’ve since come to recognize a personal tendency. In high school, I hadn’t tried anything like student government or the Forensics Club until my second year, and it would be the same at Princeton and again at law school. The first year that I face the challenges of any new environment has always been a time of fevered insecurity, a reflexive terror that I’ll fall flat on my face. In this self-imposed probationary period, I work with compulsive intensity and single-mindedness until I gradually feel more confident. Some of the looming panic is no doubt congenital; I often see in my reactions something of my mother’s irrational fear of being unequipped for nursing school. I have gone through this same kind of transition since becoming a judge, first on the federal district court, then on the appeals court, and finally on the Supreme Court.

  Sure enough, I would join Acción Puertorriqueña during my sophomore year. I would bicycle out to the far edge of campus, where the architecture descended from Gothic Revival heights to the more human scale of colonial, and then on to the less-than-human industrial modern of graduate student housing. Just before the campus dissolved into suburban New Jersey, you reached the modest redbrick building of the Third World Center: headquarters and party central not just for Acción Puertorriqueña but for all the minority student groups on campus. I knew the area well: across the avenue were the Computer Center and Stevenson Hall, a relatively new dining facility that offered alternatives to the exclusive Princeton eating clubs. I’d embarrassed myself once in Stevenson asking for a glass of milk with my meal in the kosher canteen there, but after that I felt right at home. In fact, that part of campus became my neighborhood.

  A space where one had a natural sense of belonging, a circle of friends who shared the same feeling of being a stranger in a strange land, who understood without need for explanation: it amounted to a subtle but necessary psychic refuge in an environment where an undercurrent of hostility often belied the idyllic surface. The Daily Princetonian routinely published letters to the editor lamenting the presence on campus of “affirmative action students,” each one of whom had presumably displaced a far more deserving affluent white male and could rightly be expected to crash into the gutter built of her own unrealistic aspirations. There were vultures circling, ready to dive when we stumbled. The pressure to succeed was relentless, even if self-imposed out of fear and insecurity. For we all felt that if we did fail, we would be proving the critics right, and the doors that had opened just a crack to let us in would be slammed shut again.

  We were different: not only from the generations of Princetonians who had walked through Nassau Gate before us, but, increasingly, from the friends and classmates we had left behind. I couldn’t shake the feeling of having been admitted because of some clerical oversight. Margarita felt it too, Ken said the same thing, and the sentiment has been expressed countless times by minority students everywhere: by some accident of fate, we few among the great many had won the lottery. As the winners we stood in for all those not so lucky—some truly brilliant kids like Nelson, who slipped up, or others who’d never crossed paths with someone who could point the way, or who’d never even heard there was a way. Many of us experienced our election as survivor’s guilt. I tried to frame it more optimistically: when she’d won a big pot, Abuelita used to say it was important to share the luck with others. Still, the sense of arbitrariness—unfathomable and irreducibly unsettling—would linger so that even in the best of times you could never be entirely sure that you were home safe.

  It was because of this uneasy climate that so much of the work of Acción Puertorriqueña and other such groups focused on freshman admissions. In those early days of affirmative action—again, the practice was so new to Ivy League admissions that the first Latino students had yet to graduate when I arrived—many factors that complicate the cost-benefit analysis a generation later were at the time nonexistent.

  Until we would raise kids of our own, no minority students had alumni for parents, and rare indeed were those who had not come from poor communities. The typical undergraduate had been guided to Princeton by relatives, by prep school guidance counselors, or else by teachers savvy about the system. Minority kids, however, had no one but their few immediate predecessors: the first to scale the ivy-covered wall against the odds, just one step ahead ourselves, we would hold the ladder steady for the next kid with more talent than opportunity. The blacks, Latinos, and Asians at Princeton went back to their respective high schools, met with guidance counselors, and recruited promising students they knew personally. Then, every time a minority application landed in the pile of potential admissions, they’d reach out to make the applicant feel welcome or at least a little less intimidated.

  This outreach was vital because disadvantaged students often had no idea that they stood a chance at a place like Princeton, assuming they’d even heard the name. In high school, I was vaguely aware that affirmative action existed, but I had no idea how or to what extent it worked in practical terms. When the two Hispanic students met me at the station in New Haven to show me around Yale, I was inclined to see their ethnicity as more a matter of pleasant coincidence than a programmatic effort. At most, I figured, they were being nice to one of their own kind, rather in the way Ken had encouraged me to consider Princeton and the other Ivy League colleges, not out of any political agenda. My innocence was the result of being unaware of just how few Latinas there would be in a place like Princeton, or for that matter that my being one could have figured so much in my admission.

  Beyond freshman recruiting, Acción Puertorriqueña and similar groups were vocal in campus protests relating to national issues. It was an honorable tradition, most recently involving resistance to the Vietnam War and Princeton’s entanglement with the military, but the war was over, and being a rabble-rouser did not appeal to me. Not that I didn’t care passionately about the group’s causes; rather, I had my doubts that linking arms, chanting slogans, hanging effigies, and shouting at passersby were always the most effective tactics. I could see that troubling the waters was occasionally necessary to bring attention to the urgency of some problem. But this style of political expression sometimes becomes an end in itself and can lose potency if used routinely. If you shout too loudly and too often, people tend to cover their ears. Take it too far and you risk that nothing will be heard over the report of rifles and hoofbeats.

  Quiet pragmatism, of course, lacks the romance of vocal militancy. But I felt myself more a mediator than a crusader. My strengths were reasoning, crafting compromises, finding the good and the good faith on both sides of an argument, and using that to build a bridge. Always, my first question was, what’s the goal? And then, who must be persuaded if it is to be accomplished? A respectful dialogue with one’s opponent almost invariably goes further than a harangue outside his or her window. If you want to change someone’s mind, you must understand what need shapes his or her opinion. To prevail, you must first listen—that eternal lesson of Forensics Club!

  One of our most pressing objectives was to convince the administration to ho
nor its commitment to increase the hiring of qualified Hispanics. There were almost sixty of us enrolled as students, a huge increase over just a few years ago, thanks mostly to the efforts of groups like ours. But there was not one Hispanic on the faculty or the administrative staff. It was hard, they said, to find qualified scholars, but could they not locate even one Latino janitor? You would never have known that Puerto Ricans made up 12 percent of the population of New Jersey. Quotas had not been declared illegal by the Supreme Court then, but we were not arguing in their favor. We were arguing only for some good faith effort to correct historical imbalances.

  There were no actual villains, just inertia. The administration genuinely wanted more diversity for reasons of its image as well as fairness, notwithstanding the cranky alumni letters in The Daily Princetonian. The university’s long-standing reputation as the northernmost school for southern gentlemen, which had bred resistance to desegregation, eventually gave way to some healthy soul-searching. Consequently, efforts to recruit black students were earnest and energetic. Faculty and administrative hiring of blacks still lagged, but it was going well compared with efforts among Puerto Ricans and Chicanos. Hiring committees had not a clue where to look for or how to attract suitable candidates. And so, though a high-level recruitment plan existed on paper, there was only foot-dragging and defensive excuse making. The administration wouldn’t even respond to our letters.

  It was not until we filed a formal complaint with the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare that we got President William Bowen’s attention and a dialogue opened. Within a month, the Office of Civil Rights at the Department of Education had sent someone to meet with us in the provost’s office. Before you knew it, Princeton had hired its very first Hispanic administrator—and not just any administrator: the assistant dean of student affairs, whose role was to advocate for students like us.