Thoughts on Reuniting

This weekend I attended my 20^th high school reunion. Twenty years. It is still hard to believe even though I have lived all the life that two decades brings. I know my classmates have as well but when I looked in their faces all I saw was the young boy with the easy smile or the girls who were so pretty or the high school sweethearts who have stood the test of time. They were exactly as I remember them but better. Freed from all the angst and acne of our teen years, we laughed and reveled in the successes of each other. Maybe the extra 20 lbs weighed down the insecurities of our youth, so that we could sympathize with the loss of a parent or an untimely divorce or a health crisis overcome.

This reunion was big because we did not attend a traditional high school filled with neighborhood kids. We have not had the luxury of happenstance encounters at the local market or when dropping kids off at mom’s. I graduated from the High School for Law Enforcement and Criminal Justice in the NEVER DEFEATED, NEVER OUTDONE Class of 1991. We were a part of the efforts at desegregation that loaded children into yellow school busses and moved them around the city like educational pawns. We came from everywhere in the city and few beyond its limits. Mostly working class kids who got up a little earlier to go to a school that could lead us to our dreams of being lawyers, cops and maybe a few robbers. We have become lawyers, cops and teachers and accountants and insurance analysts and entrepreneurs and saleswomen and personal trainers and every profession we could find or imagine. We even had a firefighter.

We are also interesting as a class because we were educated on the tail end of social policy that explicitly believed that children thrive and learn better in a racially mixed environments. Our class was mostly Latinos/as with a large cohort of African Americans and Whites and a few Asian Americans (mostly Viet Namese) and some who drew from parts of each. Because we had to negotiate the benefits and boundaries of intra-racial interaction early, we do not shy away from our differences and we hold fast to what we have in common. This blending is usually trickiest for the DJ, who played Selena and Bobby Brown, and INXS and some country each in their turn. We laughed when the class clown—a young man who immigrated from El Salvador and has found home and friendship in every community he has crossed—joked about the instructions he had given the DJ to accommodate our mix. I looked around while singing a Selena song to see people of different races all mouthing the words. I thought about how these boys and girls introduced me to this now Iconic Tejana who I grieved a few short years after we graduated.

It was not always easy, but I think we have all fared better for the experience. I see our continued ability to move comfortably across racial lines and the way we find solace in our communities of origin in the photos and updates that now connect us on facebook. I know that I may be romanticizing our experience. I know this becasue I did not see the classmate I ran into this summer who recounted her search for a white kid she dated in high school and how he ended their relationship because of his mother’s disapproval. I think about how I visited very few of my classmates’ homes or ate at their tables. These markers of intimacy are real, and say something about the limits of our desegregation experiment. But no less real than talking with my friend who is Vietnamese but grew up with me in the same largely Black neighborhood about the lovely Vietnamese food his mother introduced my twin sister and I to, but for some reason she made the worst hamburgers. He mentioned how kind my mom had been before he earned enough money to buy that first car. As an academic who studies race, sometimes even my private life becomes part of the analysis. I will be thinking about all the life lessons we learned while studying math and English until more memories fail me.

I also thought about all those who were not with us. The two boys who did not live to laugh with us in a park in the beautiful sun of a Texas fall. I missed the badass chica with all the kids whose sharp wit and tongue keep me going on facebook on hard days. I missed the friend who roomed with my twin sister and I in college and is still educating herself in California. Where is the Mexican boy with the thick floppy hair who offered me a ride on his motorcycle but I was regretfully too afraid to say yes. I would now. I missed the funny church girl from my school bus who finds herself in the New Mexico desert. I missed the one high school friend I kept in touch with the best and witnessed the birth of her children, but because of quarreling about the framing of our adult friendship we have not spoken in the last 6 months. Maybe we will go the 25^th together, which those of us gathered promised we would have? I hope we will fix it.

I flew in from a work obligation. Switched to the cute dress it took me months to decide to wear in the parking lot of an airport hotel. Then my sister drove us to the Friday night mixer just in time to talk with a girl I last ran into at Bikram’s yoga almost 6 years ago. I was just as happy to see her. We talked about her turn toward Eastern philosophy and our common struggles with romance. I said goodnight because of exhaustion and then hello to those same people who found two friends, my sister and I giggling like the schoolgirls we will always be still in front of the bar 2 hours later. I saw my high school math teacher who pushed us to be better with his knowledge and a few lies about senile teachers and corrupted alphabets.

I shared the experiences of pleasure and privilege of having your time fully devoted to your child with another girl, now woman, whose baby was still willing to be held in her arms. This post is sort of fragmented because that is really how I experienced the two events. I was reminded by my friend who stepped out on faith and married the man of her dreams while we were in high school—and they still reflect the love of that sweet time—of her caution that when her children were grown, at the end of my education, I would just be starting. I laughed as I ran to follow my 21-month-old son. Most of my conversations were interrupted by my son dragging me away to play or wanting my attention. Yet, I wonder if we all could experience each other so easily because the myopia of youth had been replaced by adult divisions of attention? We know now the meaning and precious nature of time.

I cannot count the number of them who said they were not surprised by the things that I have accomplished and I appreciate their affirmations of my hard work. There were so many tender moments and sweet smiles of recognition to recount in one blog post. I think this reunion was even more important for my sister and I because we have moved so far from home for now the larger part of our lives. Academia is a transient profession that promotes a kind of rootlessness that we don’t really stop to consider whether this detachment is good. We are trained to observe all things for at a distance. This weekend I had the opportunity to spend some time up close with people who shaped me in small and large ways as they too were being formed. I was reminded that roots are important.

In the morning, my son and I return to Kentucky. I have a good life there, but no one there knows me the way those 84 people in a park on Houston’s northside do. They knew me when I was young and insecure and trying to figure it all out. Now we know some things.

Now I am waiting for the 25^th to see if we are still just as cute.

Thoughts on Fall

I am sitting in the airport preparing to fly away from my son for the second time in his life and in two weeks. The crisp fall air marks the moment in the academic year where we have gone so far, but the majority is still left to go. In our hearts, all professors, like students, worship summer.

Thoughts on Being Selective About the Company You Keep (Living an Activist Life…Part 5)

This is the last excerpt from the original speech for the 2011 UK Annual Black Women’s Conference where much of the Activism pieces were first read. I have some other parts that I may share, but the tone of this warranted mention of where it fell in the line of the work.

I am joined by one of my oldest and dearest friends, Salina Gray, who has traveled here from California to kiss and love on my son. Though she is one year older than me, she has the substance of a woman of my mother’s generation. Another little black girl for whom the world did not care to soften its blows in her tender years, she too understood the hard work of counter-education at a young age.

By the time we joined each other on the grounds of Prairie View A&M University, which is for us an educational phoenix like the Library of Alexandria reconstructed on a Texas hilltop by the hands and hopes of the formerly enslaved. My friend, Salina was ready. We met in an honors colloquium where we both learned and still live by a clear understanding of the difference between being an intellectual and an intellect worker and the responsibilities of black academics to the black community. She is still one of the few people I know who finds reading Paolo Freire’s The Pedagogy of the Oppressed both fun and edifying. We have been friends through first loves and last call. Through the birth of our children, the death of my father, her grandfather and other people we held dear, Numerous cross-country moves, financial crises, graduations, and days when we were feeling fat and days when were feeling fine. My twin sister and I and a girl we had known since the 8^th grade sat next to Salina in the auditorium of Agricultural Sciences Building at Prairie View A &M University and she has now been my friend for almost more than half my life.

THOUGHTS NUMBER 5 ON LIVING AN ACTIVIST: BE SELECTIVE ABOUT THE COMPANY YOU KEEP. If you are in friendships, relationships, acquaintanceships, reading groups, prayer circles, coffee klatches, boo-ed up or it’s complicated situations that do not challenge you, support you, make you grow, learn or be better, move on to one that does. Be intentional in your choices. Sometimes be selfish when it comes to selecting people who think can teach you something. Relationships are work. Work hard at them. Nurture them. Always be open to new ones and with old ones, when they die bury them and move on.

While I spent my post-Prairie View time learning theories and quantitative methods, she was an elementary school teacher in the poor and gang riddled communities of Inglewood and Watts, trying to create educational spaces for empowerment through charter schools and training other teachers how to use their classrooms as sites for empowerment for black and brown children. She has attended more gang funerals than I probably know. Definitely more than I think is healthy because we have discussed the lingering impact of her work at length. She turned around the educational chances of nameless children while single-mothering a beautiful son who I once babysat in my college dorm and now stands over 6 feet tall. He is a kind, thoughtful young man.

I have watched with my own eyes as her 3^rd graders spoke to the city council to protest constricting library resources in their community. I have read the letters her students wrote in support of striking grocery store workers in the Los Angeles area where she taught for more than a decade. I have read their poetry, seen their art, and been subject to their intense questions—questions children in wealthier communities may live a lifetime and never ask— She was getting them ready. AND she was teaching them the complicated impositions of power that have lead to the state of affairs in the communities where they live, communities they love. All in ways digestible to their 3^rd grade minds. I have been mesmerized by the way she takes children in difficult circumstances and teaches them that they and their communities are something to be proud of and studied along side of all those who would deem them inferior.

She is a wonder in the classroom and she will tell you she is at her best when she is with children. Not just there, she has already begun teaching my son James the art of picking things up, a lesson she has been trying to teach his mother for decades. She could be wondrous in molding these young minds because she was ready. I now know that all that time she and I spent standing next to speakers in hip hop clubs, smoke filled dancehalls, at house parties with speakers in windows [If only my mother were here to see how I was not just being a smartass when I said that stuff was educational and would one day comeback to useful to me like in this talk for instance.] All of her experiences outside of her formal education were just as instructive to help her reach the children she works with as the theories of education learned in classroom’s of her student days. She takes the cultural milieu in which they exist and transforms it into tools for critique and empowerment so they too can be ready.

From the moment I entered graduate school, I began lobbying Salina to apply for the PhD. She read for sport and the desire to be better and make her students better, work I was assigned in my graduate program at the University of Michigan. But she is a woman who is not afraid to be on the front lines. So she remained in her classroom. She is a warrior for black and brown children and she has the tattoos to prove it. When she called to tell me that my years of lobbying—or she might say nagging—were making head way and she had applied to graduate school. I, of course, took a tremendous amount of credit, but the truth is she was doing it because she was ready. She applied to one school. She was accepted. In 2 years, she will have a PhD in Education with focus in Science Education and Curriculum and a certification in Environmental Resources from Stanford University and all those who peddle in the myth that black and brown and poor children are not interested in or are incapable of learning science just step aside now.

I could have talked about the “great” women of our community who are often trotted out at functions like these, like the activist and educator for whom this lecture is named, Ana Julia Cooper, like the operative for the NAACP and black woman who was tired of taking shit, Rosa Parks [you should be reading Danielle McGuire’s At the Dark End of the Street], or the black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet Audre Lorde, challenge us to use the master’s tools to dismantle the master’s house. A challenge I take with me into every class I have taught since I read that work. I can go on and on like this but on my Mt. Rushmore of Black Women are the ordinary women who in my life have done extraordinary feats to make me and my world better. My Aunt Gladys Ruth Spates Spann who became a surrogate to my mother when they lost their own, my professor Dr. Jewel Limar Prestage, whose love and confidence took me from my own Texas fields of learning to the University of Michigan, my mother Sandra Faye Spates Price whose strength has stopped the world when I needed a breath and for whom my son James is a testimony to her love. My friend Salina when she does a couple 2, 3 more things will surely be there with them. But all of them, the famous women I began with or the one’s you may have just heard of from my own personal experiences were able to do the things they did because they were ready.

I guess I would leave you with the question of what are you doing to get ready, Are you ready for the small challenges and the big ones that will surely come. How are you educating yourself or un-educating or counter educating as the need maybe? What book do you have in your bag right now that you are reading for the pure pleasure of words on a page but that also because it might be just the thing you need to be useful when it is your turn to be ready. Are the songs that you listen to taking you to a place that is useful, safe, calm? Do their rhythms and resonance remind you of the good in your and the world or challenge you to think of the bad? I want to stop here and say that this last question is not a slam against hip hop or any other popular youth music. My lifetime is marked by the birth, adolescence and maturation of rap music. It features heavily in the soundtrack of my life in ways that empower and politicize me and at times conflicts with other values and identities I hold as core to my being. You have to tailor a soundtrack that does what you need it to do for you.

What are you doing? How do your politics, sense of values inform the way you do daily tasks? What actions are you taking to transform the world or just your dorm room?

Are the relationships you are in significant and transformative? Are those to whom you are connected ready to travel with you when you make a decision to take a stand? Do you check your intimate and casual associates when they engage in racist, sexist or homophobic actions or talk? Do you salute and celebrate them when they don’t? When they deserve it?

All these thoughts on living an activist life are really just a call to be thoughtful about how you go about the very short time we are given on this earth. On what markers of progress of are you gaining ground? What injustices are you shouting down? You better be ready for the journey because this it.

Are you ready?

Thoughts on Hitting 3,000

I grew up in Texas where football has replaced cotton as king. The home of Friday Night Lights, college games on Saturday afternoon, and the NFL after Sunday service. Yet, I have always found baseball fans to be the most fascinating. It is the intellectual way they record, recollect and replay the events of games that evening or from decades before. In baseball, hitting 3000 places one in an exclusive club. I don't think that translates completely here, but I celebrate anyway. I am excited because this blog began as an effort to reach out across digital portals and build community with anyone who is struggling to blend family, work, and contribute to the development of more fair and just world. What distinguishes my 3,000 from that of Hank Aaron or Willie Mays is first, my lack of athletic prowess and second, the nature of the club to which I now belong. I have found this to be a space of inclusion, honesty and intellectual kindness. Thanks for your eyes and your words as I move forward.

Thoughts in the Aftermath of An Execution

In the debate over the execution of Troy Davis, I have been relatively silent. I have said very little. It is known that I oppose the death penalty. I have structured my life’s work around this single view among the many that I also strongly hold. I have been silent because I have spoken in the past and nothing happened.

All evening as I prepared dinner, fed my son, bathed him and read books, I listened to the coverage of the pending execution of Troy Davis on death row in Georgia. In the days and years this case has been discussed in the media and on social networking platforms, I did not say much because of my skepticism about the prospects of this man who presented a substantial amount of evidence that suggests he is not guilty of the crimes of which he was convicted or at the least, he was tried under a cloud of unfairness and injustice.

Sometimes when people are hopeful I don’t want to be the one who dashes those hopes. I do not want to be the bearer of truth. I have watched my mother be a truth bearer all my life. Because of her work as a nurse, friends and family—mine, hers, and ours—have always sought her advice in a medical crisis. I have watched and listened to her tell the truth to sick relatives and friends in the face of the hopes that things might go a different way. I have sometimes judged her for telling the truth even as I grew to appreciate the steadiness of a woman so fixed on telling it. I sometimes wanted a mother who cooed and soothed and just said everything would be ok. My mother believes the truth is soothing. She does not do this to remove or dash hope because my mother also believes in prayer. But she takes on the burden of telling the truth, I believe, because she knows that it can also be useful, freeing. I have never wanted this burden, but in this instance maybe it is mine.

I too have hope, but years of observing the implementation of the death penalty in this country have weathered and weakened the ties that hold me to that sense that justice triumphs injustice. I do not pray like my mother. I do not assert that what I am writing is the truth. I am saying that when you know too much about how a thing works—like what my mother knows about the human body—you cannot un-know it.

I know that the machinery of death is powerful in this country. It is the result of hundreds of years of repression and control and good and bad attempts to maintain order. Capital punishment as an area of legal study intrigues me because it engages all these issues and the Constitution as a fundamental handbook for fairness and justice. But, when one believes the Constitution is a living, breathing document, as I do, you have to acknowledge the limitations of all things that inhale and exhale. There is an inexactness to the way the corporeal structure of justice works when interacting with human capacities, particularly the human ability to bring harm to its kin.

While watching the coverage of the execution that night and reading response on social media, I also fielded phone calls and text messages from hopeful friends and family who wanted know what I thought was going to happen. Despite the seeming impulse of social network users to share their every motion/emotion, I have found it an easy place to be silent. To do nothing. To allow all kinds of slights to go unchecked. To keep the hopelessness of too much information to yourself. But, for the friends and family who called, I had to say something. I am my mother’s daughter and when someone I love or care for asks I am compelled to tell the truth or at least some of it.

I told them that I had two major concerns and no hope of salvation. In the aftermath, I share those concerns with you. Not to dash hopes but to frame the events as many of you sustain your efforts to work against the death penalty.

My first concern was the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996 (AEDPA often pronounced a-dee-pa). This act severely limited the ability of federal courts to intervene in state court decisions and imposed limits on the ability of the court to review new evidence like that in the Troy Davis case. AEDPA completely changed the rules of habeas (or the ability of individuals to receive help from the federal courts when state courts have treated them unjustly). Congress was acting to prevent “activist” federal courts from, in their minds, circumventing the right of state court’s to impose the death penalty for murders. Congress did not think about the innocent whose live are spared from further review. Or the innocent whose lives are taken. They only sought to streamline—really speed up—the path from the courthouse to the execution chamber.

AEDPA was signed into law by President William Jefferson Clinton who, along with a Republican majority in Congress, put in place laws that have magnified the incarceration rates of black people in this country to epidemic levels. I mention this fact because it is important to note that Democrats and Republicans have stood for and against the death penalty. I also mention it as a warning to the next person with lips who utters the phrase, “Bill Clinton was the first black president,” within slapping distance. My hand is raised. To them, but also to those who assert that there can ever be a system controlled by human beings that can assure with reasonable certainty that we will never execute an innocent person.

It is the overwhelming evidence of innocence in the Davis case that I think has really driven the community response unmatched in death penalty cases for at least a decade. In black community, the issue of innocence is particularly salient because of the history of lynching. The strange fruit of southern trees ripened again with execution of Troy Davis. A new generation of black people now have a lynching story to link them to the painful past of this form of racial violence. I have written about innocence and how it plays out in the inherently racial politics of the death penalty.

Laying black bodies on the alter of state power is an old story in this country. The new part of the story that I shared with those who voices were tinged with a desire to hear that everything would be ok is that innocence doesn’t always matter. How can the world be ok when you know that is the truth of the criminal justice system?

My second concern was a case called Herrera v. Collins decided by the Supreme Court in 1993. Leonel Herrera was a Mexican-American--which is important because part of the struggle to abolish the death penalty is to acknowledge that not only black people were/are lynched and executed--convicted of capital murder in the state of Texas. Later evidence surfaced of faulty eyewitness testimony similar to Troy Davis. The Supreme Court makes clear that ACTUAL INNOCENCE IS NO GUARANTEE OF RELIEF. The court basically says that its job is to police the process. Did you get a fair trial? If no, then we can help you. If yes, then whether you are actually innocent or guilty is not important. Once you have been tried in a fair trial, you are legally guilty. Legal guilt has meaning separately from actual guilt. Whenever I tell people about this case and the Court’s decision, they are perplexed because it goes against everything we are taught in popular culture about criminal justice system. But Herrera v. Collins stands as good law even after over 130 people have been exonerated in capital cases since 1973.

I was born in 1973. Although I chastise my students for it, we all mark time by our births. In my lifetime we have seen the resurgence of this horrific form of punishment with no clear end in sight. Watching the righteous fight for Troy Davis, I think might have be signal of a new day.

I highly recommend the radio documentary Witness to an Execution for an up close rendering of what is done in our names. You can find part of it on NPR at this link: http://www.npr.org/programs/atc/witness/.

I also published an academic article on race and innocence titled Litigating Salvation in 2006 in the Southern California Review of Law and Social Justice.

Thoughts on Saving the World on A Night When We Could Not Save One Man

There was a time in Texas that execution protocol did not permit anyone outside of the correctional staff to have physical contact with death row inmates. This meant mothers could not hug their sons before executions. I do not know what the rule is in Georgia. I share this short piece in solidarity with the mothers of Troy Davis and Lawrence Brewer and every mother whose son will lose his life at the hand of the state.

Within weeks of finding out I was pregnant, I knew in my heart my child would be a boy. By the time I reached the sonogram in the twenty-fourth week when the sex can be verified, I had already chosen his first name. I named him James for my mother’s third brother and my first substitute father. In the first twenty-three weeks this child and I were forced to have deep conversations that take some parents into adulthood to share with their children. A swirl of troubling genetic tests, faltering hormone levels, cross-country moves, and concerns about the reception of friends, family and colleagues to an unwed pregnancy—even to a woman in her late thirties with two advanced degrees and a room of her own—forced my developing boy and I to have many heart to hearts. I was elated when science confirmed what my heart knew. In less than twenty-four hours that elation would transform into intense worry.

My son was conceived in Texas. A place where my family has lived in relatively the same place for nine generations. Texas is the place where my family’s home and labor and blood are built in the soil. Where their race had for most of those generations determined their destiny. James was also conceived in “the field” or what social scientists call the places where we conduct our research. For just one year I had returned to Texas to immerse myself in this place where my intellectual efforts, if not my body, are always toiling. I visited death row. I attended hearings. I sat next to lawyers who were my teachers and models for how to be a lawyer and the ability of lawyers to change and save lives. I read. I wrote. I conceived a child.

Despite being submerged in the history and sadness of the death penalty, I had not connected that part of my life to the part that was about to be a parent until the day the sonographer said, “it is definitely a boy.” Happiness became worry when I thought about the black men I had met in prisons, jails, and other unproductive places over the years. I thought about how easy it can be for black men to be caught up in a system that does not value their survival or preservation. I thought about the first day he would be pulled over by the police for performing the ordinary task of driving an automobile. I thought about the intra-racial contests of masculinity that have lead to young black men being, at times, their own worst enemy. I thought of how, because he is my child and will surely have my mouth, the public school system will try to pathologize what I know to be precociousness. I thought about my father who only learned the grown up art of parenting a few years before his death with his 14^th child and 3^rd son who was too young at his death to fully benefit from his late maturation. All I could see were the negative statistics on the lives of black men I trade on in my professional life.

If I could save anything with my work, it would be those first hours of elation without the gradual worry for the physical and mental health of the black man in my womb now born. When asked by Nikky Finney what I would save to do the work I do, I thought about that day when modern medicine confirmed what I knew from mother wit. I would save the world, if I could. I would save it for James and all the other black men, women and children, high yellow and pitch black whose mothers have the right to have their burden of worry free from the concern that their children’s blackness will make them vulnerable in ways our arms and love will not be able to protect them.

Thoughts on Knowing Who You Are and How Far You Can Go (Leading An Activist Life Part 3)

I went home to Texas, to law school, to do something. In the early days as a student when I didn’t know enough law to be of legal help, I read through juror questionnaires in cases where there were claims of racial discrimination in jury selection to help identify the race of jurors. A 1973 graduate of the Booker T. Washington High School—black man. With my undergraduate degree and nearly PhD, I did basic secretarial work—answering phones, research, sorting mail. I did not have sufficient knowledge of the law at that time but I knew some things like a woman who went to the Franklin Beauty School in 1967 was a black woman and we should be sure to double check the transcripts for her voir dire with the prosecutor.

You also know useful things beyond the books you are studying.

I did not mind doing these things some thought beneath my credentials because I was being educated and educating myself. I was doing what needed to be done. I also worked with immigrants seeking asylum in the aftermath of September 11^th never knowing that 10 years later I would be teaching immigration at the University of Kentucky College of Law. I tutored students in after school programs. I did lots of things. I carried food for fundraisers. I assisted in the preparation of briefs, of court documents. I went to court. I went to death row.

The first time I went to death row, my mother said two things. The first was call me when you get back. I wasn’t sure if she thought I would need a shoulder to cry on or she thought they might keep me. The second thing my mother told me was don’t fall in love through the bars. "Men in prison have a lot of time their hands, you are not something for them to do," she said. So with my mother’s words I went. I went to death row and have since been back many times. The last time I went I was already pregnant with my son. Just like my mother before me, my child is a part of my life and therefore my life’s work. I have sat and looked into the eyes of men who know/knew the date and hour of their deaths because they were set by the Texas courts.

There is a gospel song that says, Oh taste and see that the Lord is good, My mother told me about it but I taught it for myself and found out he’s good.

Because I had been with my mother when she met with the sick and the shut-in, when we thought her youngest brother, the one who was just a baby when her mother died, had drawn his last breath (a sound that haunts me still), when we buried her beloved brother, James—for whom my son is named—in the foreign soil of Pennsylvania so far from our Texas homeland, I thought I knew what I was doing when I sat across from a man who said to the lead attorney that he would rather give up his valid legal claims that might spare his life and be executed rather than have go through the chemotherapy required to battle his recent diagnosis of cancer on death row. At that point, still a student, I was not ready. But watching my mother, I at least had a picture of her face in difficult times to mimic so that the horror of this young man’s life choice did not bleed through into my facial expression AND how to hold my tears because who am I to cry when it his life in the balance. I got to go home that night to my nice apartment and comfortable bed where I could not sleep but have woken up everyday since aware that I am free.

I kept working, but I also knew that I could not make this work I was so passionate about my daily work and maintain good mental health. I retreated after law school to the distanced world of legal scholarship. I finished the PhD I started. I became a member of the Texas Bar. I continued work with lawyers on special projects and some cases but I could not be on the front lines.

LESSON NUMBER 4 IN LIVING AN ACTIVIST LIFE: KNOW WHO YOU ARE. Know what you are capable of. Where you are willing and not willing to go. Know who your resources are and if they are capable of saving you when you fall. Too many good women have been crushed when they took a risk and jumped thinking someone would catch them. Know if you need someone to catch you. Not everyone does. Know if you are willing to free fall.