Chapter seven: Getting into law school

Fast forward twenty years, to my twenty-seventh year of life. The day I found out I was going to law school. It was pretty unremarkable. I was living in a second floor walk up in Brooklyn, a world away from where I came from when the big package arrived in the mail box. I knew immediately when I removed the package from the mail box that I had been accepted. Rejection letters never came in big envelopes. They came in small envelopes and where usually one-pagers, thin and abrupt. This envelope was huge, thick and lush. A big smile came over my face when I pulled it out and saw that it had come from New York Law School. It had been the only school I had applied to. And they wanted me. They had accepted me. I tore upstairs to call my parents, to tell them that my dream was coming true. I was heading to law school. I was going to be a lawyer.

I was a late acceptee. I had only a few weeks before the first day of school. It was almost as thrilling as my first day of kindergarten. Only this time I"d remember to wear my underpants. One would hope.

Chapter five - Getting chased by fowls

I grew up on the land. Back then, land ownership was a sign of wealth. Everybody owned a piece of land, or wanted to own it.

Granny Avie had a quasi farm. On it, she raised, fowl, goats, pigs, dogs, cats and pigeons. She had a coal kiln where she baked wood into coals which she then used for cooking in her coal pot. She grew every vegetable: corn, peas, potatoes, tomatoes, edoes, beans and figs. She had banana trees, pommegranate, cherry, coconut, soursop, plum and guinip trees in her yard. There was nothing more delicious than cook-up rice with peas and fowl feet that was cooked on a coal pot, only to be followed up with a dessert of fresh fruits. In summer time, when school was out, we spent most days with her, at her place, growing vegetables, baking wood, and eating rice and fowl feet, then gorging ourselves on plums and soursop. Then we'd run around barefoot once the sun stopped blazing, playing various games with balls and sticks.

These were some hot days, burning hot, long and delightful. My cousins would come to the village from town to visit with us, and we all would compete for grannie Avie's attention and love. But it was no contest. Except for my older cousin, who actually lived with Granny Avie, nobody, not even my brother, could take my place in her esteem. She adored me and that's the end of the discussion.

I can't say the same for the animals. It is from then that I developed a fear of animals, even for fowls. Because they always seemed to have a thing against me, especially fowls with newly hatched chicken. I remember being chased across the yard by an angry fowl who thought I had come too close to her precious babies. I screamed and hollered as I raced to granny who was doubled up in stitches at my circumstance. She liked to tell that story of how I was chased by the angry fowl, or how I was butted by the angry goat, or one of those. I don't know what it was. But the animals never seemed to take very kindly to me at all and it was a running joke that I was terrified of animals. The human animals are particular vicious and I've always been wary of them. Maybe because I was a bully magnet from Kindergarten. To this day, I still don't know what to make of "animal" people.

Chapter four-The King arrives

My brother, "the King" was born when I was about five years old. I was at school that morning, and we had just received lunch recess, when I saw my father's black car come rolling up the hill, on the Main Road that led down to our home. My mother was sitting in the front seat and they looked very happy as if they had won the lottery. They did not see me coming out of the school yard as there were so many children running out of the school yard at the same time, and heading home for lunch. So daddy did not stop to pick me up. But it was only a short walk to the house from school, literally a hop and a skip. I was a big girl now and could walk home alone. I got home just as they were piling my mother, her belongings and the baby wrapped up in blue swaddling cloth whom she peered at as if he was the second coming of Christ, out of the black Humber.

Suffice to say my brother's grand arrival was marked by all the pomp and circumstance of a Royal birth. It seemed everybody came to look at him and give my parents their congratulations, as if it was such an accomplishment to have a son, as if having four daughters was no big deal at all. This was not sitting very well with me at all.

Plus, my brother's birth shuffled my place in the clan. He was the only son, the only grandson too and this propelled him into the spotlight, pushing me back behind his shadow. Was there a bit of envy there on my part? Did I envy my brother? Of course. Of course. For all intents and purposes, my brother might as well have been called HRH the Prince of Glory Alley and we might as well have been his dutiful subjects, because that is how it was. I could not compete with the production of a male heir. This was tough, I guess, a bruise to my ego, as until his welcomed arrival, I was still center stage. But even Granny Avie cooed over this child, sometimes so much so that I worried she'd forget just how much she loved me. I have to say my brother's arrival relegated us girls to second class citizen status. And it was fine, I guess. None of us really knew what to make of him to tell you the truth. He was a different species, one we were not used to in our close-knit clan and it was clearly going to take a whole lot of adjustments.

And I adjusted. Boy did I adjust. But, as is true now, there is only so much I am prepared to tolerate before my cup is filled. And once my cup is filled and starts to overflow, well, maybe I'm not so charming anymore. And so, I guess the confrontation was inevitable. I mean, how long and for how many years was I to take a backseat to my brother?

So, one day, I put my foot down. I had had enough of all the disparate treatment. I had enough of feeling invisible, as if me and my sisters no longer counted in the household. I did what any self respecting nine year old would do in a situation like that which I found myself in. I demanded fair and equal treatment under that roof. You got that right.

Here's the scenario. As HRH grew, my father took to taking him to see Karate films every Sunday at the Gem Cinemas in Town. At the same time, we, the four girls would be left home to entertain ourselves with dollies or whatever it was we chose to do for our own entertainment. I mean, excuse me. This was fine once. It may have been fine twice. But once I realized it was a pattern of discrimination, I stood up one day and demanded of my father (in dialect mind you) "Oh, so he's the king and we're the dogs?!" My father gaped at me in shock. "What are you saying? Why are you taking this tone with me?" he demanded. "Well," I said simply, "we want to go to the movies too."

Naturally my father was astonished by my candor and bravery. My father was not a stern man by any means, but he was my father and I challenging him about something he took for granted: Sunday afternoon bonding sessions with his son. I had no problem with father/son bonding, but it seemed to me that we girls had eyes and we could enjoy a movie now and then too. It seemed fundamentally unfair that just because we were girls we were being left home. And it got to the point that I couldn't shut up about it anymore. It didn't matter how scared I was of the consequences. It didn't matter that I was shaking in fear of reprisal. I had to speak my mind. I had to speak my truth.

I remember my father looked at me with a funny expression. He was bewildered, but he was guilty as charged and there was nothing he could do but respect me for standing up to him. Right was right and wrong was wrong. He said, "okay girls, get dressed. I'm taking you all to the movies!"

Needless to say, we were thrilled to bits.

Chapter Three--Math

Kindergarten was tough, almost as tough as law school, and it was from way back then that I hated studying and I only "did well," when pushed. I frankly just didn't get the point of it - kindergarten, I mean. I remember the first day I arrived to the local village school. It was September, the first Monday in September. Sometime in the 70's. My mother had asked my grandmother to take me to school, and register me into class. Of course, granny was only happy to do it. I was her little pet, her little contessa. There was nothing she would not do for me.

I was only four years old. But I remember my first day of school for a number of reasons mostly because they had forgotten to put on my underpants and I was so too embarassed to point it out, so I just went to kindergarten without my underpants on that first day. It has always been strange how I could be so outspoken, yet so shy and inhibited when it comes to other things. I just held on tight to granny's hand, and kept my mouth shut and walked up the hill to my new school. Granny walked me straight to the headmistress's office. Her name was Ms. Tibbou. And she had a serious love affair with corporal punishment - aka, the belt. It was sitting there on her desk like a big black cobra. It's crazy but in the Caribbean, especially back then, teachers and administrators could beat other people's kids. I don't remember getting beat in Kindergarten. But I do remember getting beat, severely, in Junior 4 (Fourth grade), and this was in front of my father, and this was because I was a few minutes late for morning prayers.

But back to Kindergarten. As I said I was only four. I hadn't yet heard the word "lawyer." I didnt know then I wanted to be a lawyer. All I knew was I had no desire to do anything other than go back home and play. Bad reports went home to my parents from the start. It was Marion this, or Marion that. As if my parents hadn't heard it all before. They fully expected me to be a handful. I was an energetic child. What did these teachers expect? For me to actually sit?

I had half a note book. In those days, they would take a soft-covered notebook and cut it into two halves for the little kids in Kindergarten. Oh, wait. Kindergarten is an American word, isn't it? No, there, it was called Infants. They cut the note book in half for the infants. Frankly, I didn't do any work. I doodled. I goofed off. Kind of the way I approached my first semester in law school. I never sat in my chair. I peered out the window and, overall, did whatever it was that I pleased. The teachers ranked me last in achievement in Infants. They said I was immature, I couldn't write, could barely say my ABC's and most definitely could not count from one to ten if my life depended on it. If you talk to a couple of my law school professors, I wouldn't be surprised if they would say the same thing about me after the first year of law school. In my book, The Law School Rules, (which I wrote after the first year of law school) one can get a sense of just how traumatized I was by this momentous time and occassion.

My mother tolerated my antics in Kindergarten, I would say, for the entire year. But then, she drew the line when I moved from Infants to Junior One. I remember one night I came home. She asked, "Marion, do you have homework?" Homework?! I don't know! And she got out the belt. Just like that. And she said, "okay, if you don't have homework, I want to hear you recite your two times tables."
My two times tables?! I don't know! And she said, "Okay. Well, tonight you're going to learn." Tonight?! And that was the beginning of an oddessey with my mother, and her quest to have the most intelligent, most well behaved children in the whole village. With me, it was going to be a very tall order indeed.

Let's just say that by the time I went to bed that night, I knew all the tables my mother wanted me to know, and then some. And from that day forward, I was always first in my class, except in Junior 5, when my cousin Lester King placed first in a Math test, somebody placed second, my crush Vonroy placed third. And I placed fourth. It was the talk of the School. No, wait, what am I saying? It was the talk of the village. People were actually gleeful that I had fallen to fourth! I had never seen anything like it. Not only the children, but their parents were gleeful and almost threw a fete to celebrate my downfall. It came as a shock that people would enjoy my failure as much as they seemed to. I was devastated. Absolutely devastated. And inconsolable too.

I have always, and still to this day, hated Math.

Chapter Two--Racing the Rain

Between the ages of seven and twelve, life as I remember it was an idyllic fantasyland. It was a simple life, an organic existence, peppered with characters who didn't know just how little, or how much they had. They were just accepting. Of whatever life brought. As a result, people, except for Susan Furlong's mother, were very, very happy.

Ms. Furlong (she never married though she had a truck load of kids, I can never forget this woman) once stopped by my mother's gap and engaged my mother in conversation for quite a number of hours. I remember it because she had never stopped by before or after that. The Furlongs lived at the far reaches of the village, almost half way to town, so her being in our parts, in Glory Alley, as they called it, was weird. She fascinated me. Not just because she and all her children were the darkest shade of Black I had ever seen, but she seemed very convicted about whatever it was she was talking about. My mother who had very little tolerance for anybody, stood for hours and dutifully listened to this woman. And I lurked around, pretending to be playing with the flowers in my mother's garden, listening. I think Ms. Furlong was considerably older than my mother. (Everybody was considerably older than my teen-aged mother, actually.) And she seemed so much more informed. I don't remember anything else she said to my mother that afternoon, but I do remember her saying, "Poverty is a crime. Is a crime." This phrase reverberated in my head since that day, even now, when I reflect on life, and on the world. I think I've come to understand what Mrs. Furlong meant when she said, "Poverty is a crime...."


I would say that as young as seven, I was aware that we were poor. I knew we were not dirt poor like some of the other children who ran around the village without shoes. But we were not well off like the Birds, the Benjamins, and the other people who lived on the periphery of the village, in massive concrete mansions, never mixing with the ordinary folks like us who invariably lived in wooden houses, and some of whom did not have indoor plumbing, or a pipe of their own. We were lucky in that my father had had pipes run in our home. So the experience of going to Top Tank, (the central place where the villagers obtained water) or using a "latrine" was a pleasure I have not personally experienced. But this was life for many of my neighbors and many of my friends. And they lived, as if everything was a celebration.

If it took money to be happy, none of us knew it. I remember a lot of laughter, cackling really in those days, by children and adults alike. For one thing the weather always cooperated. It was always warm and when it wasn't, it rained. That was a welcomed distraction. First of all, it meant there would be no school. Second of all, it meant playing in the puddles, making paper boats which we could sail off to Puerto Rico and other exotic locales (laden with fruits) and otherwise, indulging in our version of a snow day. I especially loved to race the rain. Because, often, the rain didn't begin as a downpour, it commenced instead as this strange cross-pour. By that I mean, it would start out near the water, in Pickotts, say, and spread across the fields, across the villages, till it reached us in Glory Alley. So, if I was say, at the shop when the rain started, I would hear it coming up the hill from all the way out at Pickotts. And I would hurry up and buy whatever it was my mother sent me to buy and tear home in a mad dash, trying to out run the rain. I called it "racing the rain."

It didn't rain all that often. We had many spurts of drought, though the whole concept was lost on me till many years had passed and many lessons had been learned. Back in the days of my ignorance, it was all about play, chores, church, school, lots of cook outs, entire weekends on the beach with everybody and their mother (except for Susan Furlong's mother), dreaming of being a lawyer, dreaming of far away places, and racing the rain.

Chapter One--Hubris

I was seven years old when I decided I would be a lawyer. It was a very firm decision, etched in wet concrete, which subsequently dried in the abyss of my little mind. It was an ordinary day when I made this innocuous, seemingly silly decision, a sunny, hot day, probably in December, although I don't recall the month.

I was home, in my birth home, (America later adopted me) in that tiny Caribbean island which shows up (if we're lucky) as a dot on most maps. I was having a "roundtable" discussion with the elders, who seemed to have a penchant for standing around and listening to my ramblings--a captive audience--like acolytes listening to the pontifications of Pius the Tenth and his infallibility theories regarding the assumption of the Blessed Virgin into heaven.

From as far back as I can recall, I had delusions of grandeur. I believed, assumed, rather, that I captivated those around me, by my mere existence and gift of gab. My grandmother, Avie, in particular, was smitten, I was convinced, and thought I was the greatest thing to have been born and reared in the village since "Whappee killed Phillip" circa 1706. She was, single-handedly, and with her myriad indulgences, responsible for my hubris.

She said I was born forty years of age. It was clear that I was precocious, that I understood and said things that were way ahead of my years. As far as I was concerned, in my seven year old wisdom, granny Avie was right.

I was beyond womanish. I could be found any given afternoon in the company of women my grandmother's age--in their forties and fifties--listening to grown up gossip and wearing grown up flip flops. I had a way, that I would stand back with my hands akimbo, always in a state of hysteria, explicating, doubting, or demanding of one thing or the other. It amused and thrilled them and the more I realized this, the more I "performed." I had a distinctive laugh, like my father. It was loud and boisterous and not at all demure. My laughter could be heard echoing into the hills and got me the moniker of "little vagabond."

The mischief I often found myself spearheading was legendary, and knew absolutely no boundaries--neither for that matter did the consequences once my mother got wind of my latest transgression. But make no mistake about it. Back then, it was all about me. I was the center of my own concocted universe, and still, to this day, live largely in my own world.


Yes, my id ego was off the charts. I didn't even know it was ego, for to me, it was just the way things were. I was the center of life as I knew it, all things and people revolved around me. I could do and be and become anything that my little mind and heart conceived and desired--including becoming a lawyer. It never occurred to me, or to them, that my dreams would not come true. One day, a day that was like most of the others, granny asked me, "What do you want to be when you grow up?" And without hesitating, I replied, "a lawyer." And she beamed down at me, as if I had said something unseasonably smart. And she nodded her head and said, "Yes. that's exactly what you will be." I smiled back up at her, feeling really intelligent, as if I had made the most perfect choice in the world. She went out and told the whole village. All her friends. My parents, siblings, cousins, friends and foes. They all believed. To them, it seemed self-evident even more than it did to me, as the years wore on.

Eventually, those words of mine, and those expectations of theirs crystallized in my mind and became dogma. There came a time in the history of my life when there was nothing else I could imagine being, nothing else I could be.

But it would be 30 long years before I would realize my dream. And by then, I would feel like Cinderella, the girl who accidentally got taken to the Ball. And, of course, what would the ball be without a flock of wicked step-sisters and their male counterparts?