My Beloved World

by Sonia Sotomayor

  But the whole process still seemed like make-believe, even when Senator Moynihan’s office phoned soon after, inviting me to meet him in Washington. He turned out to be so forthright and gregarious that I warmed to him at once. We talked about Puerto Rico and the challenges facing the Puerto Rican community in New York, our conversation ranging widely from Eddie Torres (a judge who also wrote crime novels that the senator admired), to getting out the Latino vote, to the eternal question of the island’s status. Here, clearly, was a scholar as well as a politician, someone who understood the sociology as well as the policy issues while also possessing the social skills of a master diplomat. I was enjoying our talk so much I would have forgotten entirely about being on the hot seat were it not for the continual interruptions of phone calls and questions from his aides. Each time, he filled me in afterward on the issue he was dealing with, and we would continue, weaving the new theme into the conversation. There was a gracious art to this seemingly effortless chat and to the way he exerted his prodigious intellect, never to intimidate, but rather to invite you to engage him at whatever level you found comfortable.

  After more than an hour of this, I sensed that we were coming to an end and prepared to thank him before going off to wait out the predictably interminable period of deliberation I’d already girded myself for. But the senator had one more surprise in store, saying, “Sonia, if you accept, I would like to nominate you as a district court judge in New York.” He warned me that the confirmation process would not be easy. The Bush administration was not in the habit of smiling on recommendations from a Democrat; on principle, it would fight any candidate he proposed. “It may take some time,” he said, “but I’ll make you a promise: If you stay with me, I’ll get you through eventually. I won’t give up.”

  Then he asked if I was willing to hold up my side of the bargain: Was I prepared to spend a good portion of my remaining professional life as a judge? I was stunned. Until that moment, I had still not allowed myself to believe lest I awaken from this daydream. But here was Senator Moynihan looking at me, waiting for an answer. “Yes!” With all my heart, yes.

  I floated out of the Russell Senate Office Building and wandered down the street in a daze. After a couple of blocks I saw a monumental flight of stairs, familiar white columns: the Supreme Court Building glowing serenely, like a temple on a hill. There could not have been a more propitious omen. I felt blessed in that moment, blessed to be living this life, on the threshold of all I’d ever wanted. There would be plenty of time soon enough to deal with my insecurities and the hard work of learning this new job. For the moment, though, I just stood there, dazzled at the sight and glowing with gratitude—until reality intervened: Where could I find a cab to the airport?

  All during the flight home my mind was racing through the practical considerations. How would all this change my life? Would I need to move to Manhattan? How much, exactly, does a judge make anyway? I was still immersed in such lofty considerations when I got off the plane and noticed all the people making a big fuss over some celebrity who had arrived on the same flight. I’d been too distracted to notice that I’d been sitting next to Spike Lee for over an hour.

  MY MOTHER AND OMAR had been together for a few years at that point. At first she’d told me only that she was renting my old bedroom to this man. Then, meeting him a couple of times on visits home, I sensed that there was more to the story than they were saying. Arriving late one night, I surprised them kissing in the lobby. “Do you have something to tell me?” I asked. Mami was flustered, beaming, embarrassed, and clearly very happy.

  “We were going to tell you, Sonia. I just didn’t know how.” As I got to know Omar over time, I fully approved of my mother’s choice. Now they were sitting side by side on the couch in my living room in Brooklyn, and I was the one who had to figure out how to break the news.

  “Mami, Omar, I’m going to tell you something, but you have to promise to keep it a secret. There won’t be a public announcement for a couple of weeks, but I’ve been given permission to tell you.” I asked if they knew who Senator Patrick Moynihan was. Tentative nods. “The senator is going to nominate me to become a U.S. district court judge in Manhattan.”

  “Sonia, how wonderful! That’s terrific news!” As always, Mami’s initial reaction was enthusiasm. She didn’t always understand fully what my news meant, but as a matter of maternal principle she was a loyal cheerleader. Omar too congratulated me earnestly. Then the questions started.

  “So, you’re going to earn more money, right?” my mother said.

  “Not exactly, Mami. A judge’s salary is much less than I’m earning now.”

  She paused for a long moment. “Well, I guess you’ll be traveling a lot, seeing the world?”

  “Not really. The courthouse is in downtown Manhattan, and I can’t imagine I’ll be going anywhere else. Not the way I have at Pavia.”

  The pauses were growing a little longer. “I’m sure you’ll meet interesting people and make friends as nice as the ones you’ve met at the firm.”

  I was determined not to laugh. “Actually, the people who appear before a judge are mostly criminal defendants in serious trouble or people fighting with each other. There are ethical reasons too why I wouldn’t be socializing with them.”

  Silence, and then: “Sonia, why on earth do you want this job?”

  Omar, who knew me well by now, came to my rescue. “Conoces tu hija. You know your daughter, Celina. This must be very important work.” The look on Mami’s face carried me back to that moment under the rumbling El train when we shared our uncertainty about what lay ahead of me at Princeton: “What you got yourself into, daughter, I don’t know …” In truth, I’d had no idea then that Princeton would be only the first stop on a magical ride that by now had already taken me farther than I could have ever foreseen.

  Now all I had to do was wait for the political process to run its long and bumpy course. It’s the president who appoints federal district court judges. In many states, however, including New York, the senators propose candidates, and the president accepts their suggestions as a courtesy. In a twist special to the Empire State, Senator Moynihan had long before hammered out a bipartisan agreement with his Republican counterpart, Jacob Javits, that would survive turnover in the Oval Office: for every three nominations from a senator of the president’s party, a senator from the loyal opposition could offer one. There were several vacancies at the time, and it was Senator Moynihan’s turn to submit names to President George H. W. Bush. But the existence of this entente between gentlemen of the Senate didn’t oblige the administration to like it or even facilitate the process.

  The eighteen months that it took my nomination to clear were an education in the arts of politics and patience. I knew that the delays had nothing to do with me personally. Two interviews with the Justice Department, investigations by various government agencies, and eventually the Senate confirmation hearings had all gone smoothly. No one had voiced doubt about my qualifications or otherwise objected to my appointment. But I was still just one piece on the board among many to be sacrificed or defended in the baroque, unknowable sport that was the biggest game in town and in which procedural delay was a cherished tactic. Through it all, Senator Moynihan was as good as his word, never flagging in his effort or allowing me to give up hope. I tried not to be overly disheartened, but the delay did put me in an awkward limbo at work. I was trying to make a graceful if protracted exit, wrapping up business with clients and making the appropriate handoffs to colleagues, but there was no clear end in sight. I can be patient but not idle, and I still needed to earn a living.

  Meanwhile, I would become aware of a chorus of voices rising in my support. The Hispanic National Bar Association lobbied the White House steadily and rallied grassroots support from other Latino organizations. If confirmed, I would be the first Hispanic federal judge in the state’s history, a milestone the community ardently wished to achieve (José Cabranes had very nearly claimed the honor in 197
9 but was simultaneously nominated for a judgeship in Connecticut and chose to serve there instead, though much later he would take a New York seat on the Second Circuit Court of Appeals). Even before Senator Moynihan had settled on my name for the nomination, a veritable This Is Your Life cast of backers came forward: my fellow board members at PRLDEF, Bob Morgenthau and others at the DA’s Office, Father O’Hare and colleagues on the Campaign Finance Board, lawyers I’d known through mutual clients. They wrote letters, made phone calls, and volunteered to make the sorts of informal appeals to colleagues that can be persuasive when echoing from many sides. I was astonished to see all the circles of my life telescoping on this one goal of mine, making it seem all the more as if everything until now had been a prelude to this moment.

  Finally, on August 12, 1992, the U.S. Senate confirmed my nomination to the District Court for the Southern District of New York, the mother court, the oldest district court in the nation. The public induction ceremony followed in October. Though brief—perhaps all of five minutes—it was far from perfunctory. Every moment of it moved me deeply: donning the black robe, swearing solemnly to administer justice without respect to persons, equally to the poor and the rich, and to perform my duties under the Constitution faithfully and impartially. So help me God. I took, for that occasion only, the traditional newcomer’s seat between the chief judge, Charles Brieant, and Judge Constance Baker Motley, the next most senior of the estimable colleagues I was joining. Such ritual was profoundly humbling, signaling as it did the paramount importance of the judiciary as an institution, above the significance of any individual, beyond the ups and downs of history. Whatever I had accomplished to arrive at this point, the role I was about to assume was vastly more important than I was.

  The sense of having vaulted into an alternative reality was compounded by no less disorienting changes in my personal life. I moved to Manhattan, because I needed to live within the area of my jurisdiction. Dawn was appalled that I would shatter our neighborhood idyll on account of some minor rule, frequently bent. I feared she would never forgive me for abandoning her in Brooklyn, but for me there was a deep sense of honor at stake. I was becoming a judge! How could I not follow the rules? I don’t claim to be flawless. I’m a New Yorker, and I jaywalk with the best of them. On more than one occasion I may have broken the speed limit. But at that moment in my life, my deep and rational respect for the law as the structure upholding our civilized society was tinted with a rosy glow of irrational emotion. I felt a sense of awe for the responsibility I was assuming, and my determination to show it respect trumped even my loyalty to a wonderful neighborhood and the close company of dear friends.

  My mother meanwhile had plans of her own. In what seemed a flight of wild impetuousness, more in keeping with the Celina who’d run off to join the army than the mother I’d known, she decided to move to Florida, leaving me to feel once more, perhaps irrationally for an adult and now a judge, the sting of her abandonment. She and Omar had gone there on vacation the Monday after my induction, and the next thing I knew, Mami was on the phone, telling me in a giddy voice that she’d rented an apartment.

  Within days of their return to New York, the apartment in Co-op City was packed up. When the cartons were removed, I stood with Mami in the empty apartment, our voices bouncing off the scuffed walls, the hollowness echoing with so many years, amid a confluence of our tears and memories. We hugged, and then it was good-bye, Mami and Omar driving away.

  Before they even reached Florida, I got a phone call from Puerto Rico: Titi Aurora had died. She had gone there to move her husband to a nursing home—the second husband, who was even crazier than the first and who’d entangled her already hard life into still further knots of sadness and exhausting labor. This was not news I could break to Mami over the phone. I needed to get on the next flight to Miami and be with her when she heard it. Titi had fought bitterly with Mami over the move to Florida. They squabbled often over all sorts of small things, but this had become a much deeper rift. To learn that death had cut off any possibility of reconciliation would, I well knew, cause Mami unbearable pain.

  I marveled at how two such very different women could live so tightly bound to each other. Affection was not part of the recipe, nor was any emotional expression beyond their habit of snapping at each other. There was no confiding of secrets, no sharing of comfort visible to others. A lesson would emerge for me from their strange sisterhood: the persistence or failure of human relationships cannot be predicted by any set of objective or universal criteria. We are all limited, highly imperfect beings, worthy in some dimensions, deficient in others, and if we would understand how any of our connections survive, we would do well to look first to what is good in each of us. Titi could be disagreeable because her life had been harsh, but she lived it honorably, firmly grounded on a rock-solid foundation of personal ethics that I deeply admired. For her part, Mami, though more compassionate with strangers, brought to this relationship gratitude beyond measure for mercy shown in hardship a very long time ago. It was a gratitude time hadn’t faded, and that too I deeply admired.

  I rented a car at the airport and arrived at the unfamiliar apartment complex very late at night after getting lost, driving in tearful circles. My mother must have phoned Junior before I arrived; however it happened, when she opened the door, it was clear that the news had already reached her. She fell into my arms sobbing.

  We traveled together to Puerto Rico to bury Titi Aurora. I didn’t break down until I was handed the envelope of cash that she had set aside with my name on it. We’d kept the old ritual: whenever she was going to Puerto Rico, I would lend her the money for the plane ticket. In recent years, I desperately wanted to give her the money, considering I could now afford it and she was living on Social Security. But she wouldn’t have it: if she simply accepted the cash as a gift, she could never ask for it again, as, of course, she would surely need to.

  Back in New York, I helped sort out the few wisps of a material life that Titi had left behind. There was precious little for someone known to us as a pack rat. Most of what remained was a closetful of gifts that she couldn’t bear to part with or to use.

  “WHAT ARE YOU so scared of?” Theresa asked. “What could possibly go wrong?” She had come with me from Pavia & Harcourt, her reassuring presence in chambers perhaps the only thing keeping me tethered to any semblance of sanity. My first month as a judge I was terrified, in keeping with the usual pattern of self-doubt and ferocious compensatory effort that has always attended any major transition in my life. I wasn’t scared of the work. Twelve-hour days, seven-day weeks, were normal for me. It was my own courtroom that scared me. The very thought of taking my seat on the bench induced a metaphysical panic. I still couldn’t believe this had worked out as dreamed, and I felt myself almost an impostor meeting my fate so brazenly.

  At first, I worked around my anxiety by scheduling every single conference in my chambers. Until a case actually came to trial, I could skirt the problem. Finally, there came before me a case involving the forfeiture of the Hells Angels clubhouse in Alphabet City, and the marshals in charge of security drew the line. I could not meet with this bunch except in open court.

  “All rise.” The trembling would pass in a minute or two, I told myself, just as it always had since the first time I’d mounted the pulpit at Blessed Sacrament. But when I sat down, I noticed that my knees were still knocking together. I could hear the sound and wondered in complete mortification whether the microphone set in front of me on the table was picking it up. I was listening to the lawyers too, of course, as the telltale tapping under the table continued, a disembodied nuisance and reproach. Then a first question for the litigants occurred to me, and as I jumped in, I forgot about my knees, finding nothing in the world more interesting than the matter before me right then. The panic had passed; I had found my way into the moment, and I could now be sure I always would. Afterward, back in the robing room, I confessed my satisfaction: “Theresa, I think this fish has
found her pond.”

  Epilogue

  LOOKING BACK TODAY, it seems a lifetime ago that I first arrived at a place of belonging and purpose, the sense of having heard a call and answered it. When I placed my hand on the Bible, taking the oath of office to become a district court judge, the ceremony marked the culmination of one journey of growth and understanding but also the beginning of another. The second journey, made while I’ve been a judge, nevertheless continues in the same small, steady steps in which I’d taken the first one, those that I know to be still my own best way of moving forward. It continues, as well, in the same embrace of my many families, whose vital practical support has been bestowed as a token of something much deeper.

  WITH EACH OF my own small, steady steps, I have seen myself grow stronger and equal to a challenge greater than the last. When, after six years on the district court, I was nominated to the Second Circuit Court of Appeals, and to the Supreme Court twelve years after that, the confirmation hearings would be, at each step, successively more difficult, the attacks more personal, the entire process faster, more brutally intense. But at each step, too, the numbers of family and community encircling me and coming to my defense would be exponentially greater.

  Over a thousand people would attend my induction ceremony for the Second Circuit. A more intimate group of over three hundred friends and family stayed on to celebrate that occasion and to witness my very first official act as a judge of the Second Circuit, performed that very night: marrying Mami and Omar. Combining the festivities not only doubled the joy, making the party even livelier, but also permitted me to honor those closest to me and acknowledge a debt to them—to Mami especially—for their part in what I’d become. My awareness of that debt would not be felt so keenly again for years, until the moment when I unexpectedly saw Junior’s face on the big television screen, crying his tears of joy at my nomination to the Supreme Court; the searing tears that image drew from my own eyes in turn would leave no doubt about how much the love of family has sustained me.