Hill Women

by Cassie Chambers

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  —

  There’s a perception that the only way to succeed at Harvard Law School is to work inhumanly hard. Some of the most competitive people from all over the world descend on one place with the same goal. Unlike college, where there are many different, equally valid paths for people to choose, the road forward at law school is narrow. Everyone wants the same jobs, the same clerkships, the same spots at the most selective firms. There is a feeling that anytime you’re not working or studying, you’re missing out, falling behind.

  I worked hard my first semester at law school. There wasn’t much else in my life besides studying and classes. I would occasionally go to the gym on campus, but I tried to take my books if I did; I’d read my contracts homework while bobbing on the elliptical. I had trouble sleeping for the first time in my life. I would wake up at three A.M., heart racing, and stay awake worrying the rest of the night. I didn’t fly home for Thanksgiving because I didn’t want to waste time when I could be studying.

  My first-semester law school grades weren’t great. Harvard does not give traditional letter grades, no A’s or B’s or C’s; it stopped in an attempt to improve the mental health of its overly competitive students. But Harvard does employ a few categories to rank students, and, after my first semester, I ranked in the bottom half.

  I took this blow to my ego harder than I should have. For years, I had defined myself by my grades. Academic achievement was a way for me to feel that I belonged in elite environments, and a lot of my self-worth was tied up in letters and numbers on a transcript. I had worked hard that semester, and my poor grades weren’t from a lack of effort. It seemed that, for the first time in years, I wasn’t going to be able to achieve in the way I wanted to. I moped in my dorm room for a week after grades were released. I was too embarrassed to see my friends, convinced that they would smell the failure on me.

  But, in hindsight, those grades were among the best things that have ever happened to me. For years, blind, directionless achievement had let me put off asking myself some tough questions about what I wanted. Confronting those questions was scary, and I didn’t do it overnight. But I was beginning to see that I couldn’t be the perfect law student with the perfect grades, no matter how hard I studied. I slowly understood that instead of focusing on becoming someone, I needed to figure out who I already was.

  It was in this context that I discovered the Harvard Legal Aid Bureau. It was hard to miss the Bureau students on campus. They were always in full suits or maroon hoodies. They always appeared busy, in a rush, and it seemed like they traveled in packs.

  While most students at Harvard were engaging with the law academically—writing articles, working on law journals, participating in intellectual discussions—students in the Bureau were doing it in real life. Bureau students spend at least twenty hours a week—usually much more—working as real attorneys. The organization, a 501(c)(3) that is separate from the university, provides free legal representation to low-income individuals in Boston, and the students are the attorneys who staff the cases. They represent survivors of domestic violence in divorce and custody disputes, low-income individuals at risk of losing their homes through eviction or foreclosure, and other clients who cannot afford a civil law attorney.

  The Bureau is entirely student run. The members of the board of directors are students. The executive director is a student. The president of the board is a student. Yes, there are supervising attorneys on staff, but these attorneys are hired for that purpose and no other—to provide instruction and oversight, not run the organization. That task is left in the hands of about forty young people who have not yet passed the bar exam. It is, as one professor called it, “the wild wild west of legal practice.”

  I applied for admission to the Bureau at the end of my first year. From the outside, it seemed like the Bureau was a family, and I was desperately in need of that. Plus, I was intrigued by the thought of helping people from a similar socioeconomic background as myself and my family. I had spent the past several years pretending that I fit perfectly into the privileged environments I found myself in. Now I was curious to see what it would feel like to acknowledge the mountain roots and impoverished background I’d ignored for so long. When I got the call telling me I’d gotten in, I felt a peace I hadn’t in a long time.

  * * *

  —

  The best way to describe the Bureau is to say it’s like being inside an Aaron Sorkin TV show. It’s full of quirky characters, strong personalities, and bizarre situations. I spent most of my time in the computer room, where all of the students sit together to work on their cases. One afternoon I walked in to find a random dog barking (Whose dog was that?), Sam yelling about termites (Why was he being so loud?), and Chad muttering something about the constitutional law exam (Had I done that homework?). Steve, our token Republican, wandered through the room with no shoes, running his hands through his hair and muttering about court orders.

  I became addicted to the Bureau: to the noise, the chaos, the fun. To the sense that we were all on a mission together, helping people who otherwise wouldn’t get any help. We would sit on the front porch and laugh at how stressed the rest of the students were about homework. It was hard to feel worried about law school when you had a trial the next day. I was always busy, often exhausted, and, overall, happy. After all, I told myself, life was too short to be miserable.

  I was in the Bureau’s Family Law Unit, which meant that I represented low-income women in family court—a place I found increasingly bizarre the more I got to know it. It’s still strange to me that a judge gets to make decisions about people’s marriages, relationships, and families. The two concepts seem in such conflict: the cold impartiality of the courtroom and the emotional closeness of a family.

  But I loved the impact I could have there. Nearly all of my clients had experienced recent physical violence, and most of them had young children. They were women in crisis, seeking to use the law to keep themselves and their families safe. I got to help them do that.

  There was a steep learning curve. My first court hearing was a couple of weeks after I finished Bureau orientation. It was a protective-order hearing in a small town about an hour from campus. My supervising attorney, Verner, drove me to it. Verner had a Boston accent and believed in a “sink or swim” approach to lawyering. He didn’t understand why I was so nervous to appear in court for the first time. He told me, “It will either go well or it won’t. We’ll just have to see.” I didn’t take particular comfort in those words.

  When we arrived at the courthouse, Verner told me that he was going to go sit in the back. “You don’t need Big Brother Verner standing over your shoulder,” he said as he walked away. “Just watch what everyone else does and do that.” I rolled my eyes.

  My case was the first one called. So much for watching everyone else, I thought. I looked around bewilderedly and tried to find Verner. I didn’t know where I was supposed to stand. Did I go up to the judge? Stand at the podium? Speak from where I was at? Verner, seated in the back row, gave me a double thumbs-up and a cheesy grin. I walked to the place from where I thought it made the most sense to address the judge: the witness stand. I spoke for a solid two minutes before the bailiff gently ushered me out. Turns out that the witness stand is only for people who are testifying, and lawyers never testify. My face turned bright red.

  Verner had a cheerful attitude about the whole thing. “Well, you’ll never go into court without knowing where to stand again,” he told me as we headed back toward Cambridge. He was right. The first thing I do when I get to any courtroom now is ask the clerk where I should go.

  I got better at lawyering the more I did it. I learned how to file motions and argue in court. I learned to subpoena witnesses and object to improper questions. I learned how to ask my clients about their experiences with violence in a way that helped the judge understand what they had been through and h
ow it had affected them. I started to realize that maybe there was a type of lawyering I could be good at after all. This type of law wasn’t about details or logic; it was about telling people’s stories.

  I saw a lot of my family in my clients. One of my first clients was a young woman named Fatimah. She had immigrated to the United States a few years before with her physically abusive husband, but had recently left him because she was worried about her child growing up around such violence. Twenty years old, she was going to community college and working full time to provide for her one-year-old son. When I looked at her, I saw my mother at the same age: a young woman using education to build something for her child, finding herself in a strange, unfamiliar place and learning to navigate it. We went to court to get Fatimah custody of her son, but a few weeks later she decided to go back to her abusive husband. I spent an hour with her on the phone, trying to gently persuade her to change her mind. But she wasn’t ready to leave, and it wasn’t my role to judge her. “I’ll be here if you ever need me again,” I told her before hanging up. “Don’t hesitate to call.”

  Another one of my clients, Mary, was a young mother struggling to pay her bills after she had separated from a husband who hit her and their children. Mary wanted to get a full-time job, but she was stuck caring for her disabled father. She worried about where and how she could earn enough money. In Mary, I saw Granny as a child: a young woman who had to work twice as hard because she had to care for a disabled parent. The day I got Mary sole custody, she was so excited that her normally somber face erupted into a smile. She enveloped me in a big hug, then lifted me off of the ground and twirled me around. I had to ask her three times to put me down.

  I also saw myself in my clients. We would spend hours together in the Suffolk County Courthouse, waiting for our cases to be called. After we had talked about the case for a while, we would fill the remaining time with casual conversation. Sometimes we would talk about the struggles they were facing in their lives, but more often we just made small talk. We chatted about the local news, celebrity gossip, our tastes in music.

  In their backgrounds and stories, I could see the pivot points in my own. How a few different turns along the way could have led me to face the same challenges they now faced. How chance had played a role in me ending up in the hallowed halls of the Ivy League. Once I saw it—that thread of luck running through my life—I could never again ignore its presence.

  * * *

  —

  “What do you want to be when you grow up?” I asked my second cousin Billy. He was around eight years old. I was home from law school for Christmas, and we were at Uncle Dale’s house for the holiday dinner. The house smelled like baked ham and corn bread. I stood next to the wood-fired stove that heated the house, warming my hands after being outside to visit the prize goats that Mabel—Dale’s wife—kept on the hill. This year it felt better to be at home; somehow my work at the Bureau had made me feel comfortable here again.

  I was trying to make conversation with Billy, my cousin Melissa’s son. He was a quiet child, always with his shoulders rolled forward and his eyes cast slightly down. Despite his shyness, I know that he’s bright; he took the engineering kit my parents bought him for Christmas that year and assembled the entire system in about an hour.

  “I don’t know,” Billy mumbled in answer to my question. “I guess I’ll just grow up and get on the draw.” I flinched with surprise.

  He meant the Social Security Disability system, where those who qualify as disabled “draw” a paycheck from the government each month. I shouldn’t have been surprised to hear him say this. He lives in a county where 20 percent of the population receives disability payments. His own mother had been talking about getting on disability for several years now. “My back has been hurting,” she would complain too loudly at family holidays. “I’m not sure I’ll be able to work much longer.” Everybody nodded. It’s no wonder Billy thought that the disability system was a valid career option.

  “But don’t you want to go to college?” I asked him, choosing to avoid a conversation about why getting on the draw is perhaps not the best life goal.

  “I ain’t going to college,” he said with little fanfare. “That ain’t for me. I’m going to stay in Owsley County with Papaw.” By Papaw, he meant Melissa’s father, my uncle Dale. Billy stayed with his grandparents for much of his childhood while his mother moved from husband to husband, house to house. I’d lost touch with Melissa over the years, seeing her only at the occasional family holiday. But Aunt Ruth kept me up to date about what she was doing, and I knew how different our lives had become.

  Billy’s comment bothered me; it stayed with me the rest of Christmas Day, and it distracted me from fully enjoying being with my family. Billy hadn’t finished elementary school, and he had already decided that college was not for him—that he wanted to spend the rest of his life in this holler in the mountains.

  I talked about it with my parents on the drive back to Berea, urgently trying to understand where his answer came from. I railed against Melissa during that car ride, declaring it her fault that her son didn’t understand the importance of education. “If she would just grow up and go back to school—or even get a job—maybe Billy would see things differently!” I said with the blind judgment and conviction that only someone in her twenties can muster.

  I wonder if Billy didn’t think about going to college because he hadn’t seen clearly enough what education could do. Experts on education say that exposing low-income children to higher-income environments is one of the most effective tools for motivating them to strive to do well in school. The argument is that if a child sees the possibilities an education can create, he will use education as a means to pursue those possibilities. Exposure to aspirational environments motivates students to work hard to create a better life for themselves. Of course, that process only works if there are better opportunities to be seen.

  Up to that point, Billy had had little exposure to anything other than poverty. Like they had with Melissa before him, Dale and Mabel had instilled in him fears about the world outside of Owsley County. He couldn’t go away from home because he might get sick. He couldn’t play outside too much because he might get hurt. He couldn’t try new and unfamiliar things because it might turn out badly. It was the old narrative of fear, repackaged for the next generation.

  I wanted to sit down with Billy, that Christmas Day, and explain to him the value of education. The things education had done for our family. I wanted to tell him about Granny and my mother and all of the other women he knows who have used it to better their families. But for some reason I didn’t. To this day, I still wish I had. Instead, I boarded a plane and went back to the life I had built for myself outside the mountains.

  * * *

  —

  My second semester at the Bureau, I ran for president of the organization. I won, and I tried to use my role to expand our impact in the Boston community. We started a legal clinic at a homeless women’s shelter, and collaborated with a homeless youth shelter nearby. We began a process that would enable us to take immigration cases of juveniles who’d been abandoned by their caregivers. I felt satisfied as I walked the mile home from the Bureau each evening. I started listening to Kentucky folk music again, for the first time since I’d left for UWC.

  Of all the lessons the Bureau taught me, the most important was that I wanted to use my law degree to help people. I wanted to keep doing legal services work, to work with low-income people who couldn’t afford a civil law attorney. The big question, of course, was where. There was a need for legal services attorneys all over America. I could do this type of work almost anywhere.

  Most of my classmates were going to New York, Washington, D.C., or San Francisco. They were going to work at large firms in large cities, staying on a path that was clearly marked as prestigious. I was a little nervous to deviate from that path. I had worked so ha
rd for so long for the right to be on it.

  But, as graduation approached, I knew I was ready to go home to Kentucky. Objective achievements had lost some of their attraction for me—I felt pulled more toward the things that made me happy now than toward the things others said would make me happy one day. I was proud of my work at Harvard, fighting to make life better for low-income women and children in Boston. But I knew that people in the communities I grew up in needed the same assistance. And there were fewer people willing and able to do it.

  My Christmas conversation with Billy had stayed with me. I kept thinking about him and the way he had already decided what his life was going to be. I imagined how it must feel to believe that he already knew the contours and boundaries of his whole existence. I thought that just maybe, if I was in Kentucky, I could do something about it. If not for him, at least for someone else.

  I owed a debt of gratitude to the mountains, to the values and the people who had forged me. I was ready to pay this debt, to give back something in appreciation for the things I took. I had taken the lessons and the strength of the hills and left, rarely looking back. After years of wandering the world, I knew it was time to go home.

  I decided to drive home by myself. My mother and father both offered to fly up and drive from Boston to Kentucky with me, but this felt like a journey I needed to make on my own. It was a voyage not just to a place, but to a whole new phase of life.

  I spent my last day in Boston saying goodbye to my favorite places. I went for a jog along the Charles River and had a pastry at my favorite coffee shop. I walked to campus and sat for a minute on the porch of the Bureau. I wasn’t sure if I would ever be back.