Open House: Of Family, Friends, Food, Piano Lessons, and the Search for a Room of My Own - Softcover

Excerpt from Open House: Of Family, Friends, Food, Piano Lessons, and the Search for a Room of My Own by Patricia J. Williams. Copyright © 2004 by Patricia J. Williams. Published in November, 2004 by Farrar, Straus & Giroux, LLC. All rights reserved.

I

The Fourth Wall

It was the dinner from hell, I'm not sure why I went; I was trying to be polite, I think. I wanted to be open-minded, to show myself an engaged citizen, a lover of the debating arts. Besides, it began so innocently.

"My wife and I like the kind of trouble you've been stirring, Miss Williams," he said, with a smile and a challenge. He had an avuncular, wizardy twinkle, very Albus Dumbledore. It made me feel feisty and smart like Hermione Granger. They liked my kind of trouble. But let this be a lesson: When a woman of my great dignity and years loses her sanity and starts imagining she's one of Harry Potter's magical little friends, you can be sure that the cosmic gyroscope is wobbling off its center . . .

It was only after I'd accepted the invitation that the host, a courtly old-school conservative, added that he wanted me to come because he thought it would be interesting to have me "take on" his friend J.B., an aggressive, much-published neoconservative with a reputation for sheer meanness. I should have pleaded my dead grandmother right then. But instead I got dressed up, bought a bottle of overpriced but understated red wine, and presented myself at their doorstep, feeling vaguely penitent.

My host and his wife were rich old conservatives, no middlebrow barbecue-throwing conservatives they, and so the dinner was more of a dinner party, small and formal, with four staid couples in tasteful attire. I came uncoupled, unhitched, free-floating as a dandelion puff, but they had thought ahead. They paired me with the head of the local Federalist Society a states' rights organization whose positions on legal issues fly as far to the opposite extreme of everything I believe in as is possible under the cosmos. He was young; passionately Confederate; energetic; sharp of mind, tooth, and tongue—the kind whom no one would mistake for a vegetarian. He stapled himself to my side and proceeded to grind me down over drinks: Had I ever heard of the great legal philosopher J. L. Austin? (It was a very condescending question. It's rather hard to graduate from law school without having heard of J. L. Austin.) Was I a Christian? (God knows . . . ) Explain why liberals hate everyone. (Huh?)

Over the first course, a delicate chilled soup of pureed apple and watercress, my host started gnawing at me from the other side. What year had I graduated from law school? 1975? Ah, yes, he was teaching at Yale back then and never did he encounter a worse group of students. The affirmative action students were not just badly prepared, they really didn't have the ability, you know . . . He used to read The Nation. When did I start writing columns for them? 1997. Ah, well, then, no wonder he hadn't read me; that was the year he canceled his subscription. More potage?

The main course was veal, pale and pink as a baby's bottom. "J.B. likes his meat," laughed his champagne-suited, champagne-colored wife. J.B. himself was all glistening knives as he slashed into he innocent flesh. He was a tall, hearty man, very much the gruff colonial administrator, straight-talking and speed-talking right on past the stop signs of ordinary conversational exchange. He was full of plans for the world; he knew just what was what. Head Start was a complete waste of tax dollars. Affirmative action was corrupt. If civil rights activists were so keen on integrating they'd stop trying to glad-back hand their way into jobs they weren't qualified for and go back to the ghetto where the real problems were. Genes were everything, you either had it or you didn't. Environmentalists were fanatics. Young black men who had children out of wedlock should be put in jail. When he learned that I had adopted my son as a single parent, he opined that women who raised children without a husband were engaged in child abuse. Anti-hate speech advocates were the real haters.

Two years later I am still coming up with snappy answers for that evening, witty retorts, little barbs that would have made me seem above it all, as dry-humored as a stiff martini, cynical even, please-God-less-earnest. At the dinner, however, I was hopelessly earnest. I cited statistics, studies, books—until J.B. cut me off as being elitist and out of touch. After that, I sat tongue-tied and sweaty, feeling even more powerless than he assumed I was. I could feel a deep roiling in my gene pool, a gurgling eddy in the mitochondrial stream I share with Grandfather Orangutan—I could feel the ancestral monkey blood grow red—hot and unkind, plotting sad little scenarios of revenge. I wanted to walk out but didn't have the courage to—it would be so rude—until after dessert was served, whereupon I turned down coffee and excused myself. Take that!

This is who I am. A soft-spoken, fiftysomething mush of a minority, deferential but strong, really I am. I confess to a tendency to collapse under rightish pressure, but I try to compensate by writing brave, leftish articles for The Nation under the Joan of Arc byline "Diary of a Mad Law Professor." I teach courses in contracts, consumer protection, history of civil rights, theories of equality, and general issues of law and public policy. My hair is so unruly that new students get mesmerized by it before they finally manage to wrestle themselves back down to eye contact with me. I am an anxious mother, a worrier by habit, and therefore a pretty decent lawyer. My skin is a soft custardy, mustardy brown, with lots of freckles and imperfections. I am punctual. I am good at math. I wish I had found someone to marry so I wouldn't always have to go to dinner parties by myself—to say nothing of avoiding arrest for child abuse should J.B. ever become president—but I have no regrets. I like the independence. My life is good. When not consumed by my many official duties as a politically correct, feminazi black single mother, I like poetry, walking on the beach at sunset, and traveling to new places.