They drank their coffee at the gate and watched a cruiser roll slowly past, and the officer lifted two fingers from the wheel in greeting, and both women raised their mugs in answer, like neighbors, like a street that had remembered itself on purpose.
Chapter Twenty Seven
What She Told the Law Students
The invitation arrived on heavy cream paper, the kind law schools keep for occasions they consider serious, and Naomi accepted it for a reason she did not put in her reply. She had something she wanted to say to people who were just beginning, while they were still young enough to build their habits on purpose.
The lecture hall rose in tiers above her, full of students with laptops and notebooks and the bright, exhausted look of people reading more each week than they sleep. The professor introduced her with a list of rulings long enough to embarrass her, and when he finished she thanked him, set the list gently aside, and told the room she had not come to talk about any case they would find in a book.
"I want to tell you about a question," she said. "The smallest one I ever asked that mattered."
She told it without decoration. A morning. A garden. An officer of the law who found three drops of water on his trouser leg and decided that a woman owed him her papers on her own street. She told them that she had asked him, politely, for his badge number, and that he had laughed at her, and given it, loudly, as a joke he expected the whole street to enjoy. She told them about the forty five seconds that followed. She did not raise her voice at any point in the telling, and the hall was very quiet.
"Here is what I want you to keep," she said. "The law does not usually arrive in your life wearing a robe. It arrives at a gate, on a sidewalk, at a traffic stop, in the person of someone having a bad day with power in his hands. And the first instrument of the law is not a statute. It is a question, asked by an ordinary person who has decided to be treated as a citizen."
She gave them the procedure the way her father had given it to her, in a kitchen, a lifetime earlier. Ask for the name. Ask for the number. Ask it politely, because politeness costs nothing and it makes the record clean. Then remember it exactly. Then write it down as soon as you can, with the date, and the hour, and what was said, in order. Memory, she told them, is a witness who moves away and changes addresses. Paper stays where you put it.
"Dignity," she said, "is not a feeling you wait to be granted. It is a procedure. And the glory of a procedure is that it belongs to everyone. It belongs to the judge and it belongs to the woman cleaning the courthouse steps at midnight. It asks nothing about who you are. It only asks whether you will do it."
A student in the third row raised her hand and asked the question the whole room had been holding. "What if you ask," she said, "and they laugh at you?"
Naomi smiled for the first time that hour. "Then they have told you the truth about themselves, early, and on the record," she said. "Let them. Laughter fades by supper. A number does not fade. Write it down, and let the number do what numbers do. Four eight two seven has now been read aloud in rooms that man will never be invited into, by people who will never forget it. He gave it to me himself. I only had to be willing to ask."
Another student asked what she would say to someone too frightened to ask anything at all. She was quiet a moment. "Fear is information," she said at last. "It is not failure. If you cannot ask, then remember. If you cannot remember everything, remember one thing truly, and write that down when you are safe. The record is patient. It will wait for you to reach it."
Afterward, when the hall had emptied to the sound of zipping bags, a young man waited at the lectern with his notebook held against his chest like a shield. His mother, he said, cleaned offices downtown, at night, alone, and after the news last year she had started keeping a small notebook in her apron pocket, with a pencil. He did not know why he was telling the judge this. He only knew he wanted her to know.
"Tell your mother," Naomi said, "that she understood the entire lecture before I gave it."
She drove home through the evening traffic with her windows down. The students would forget her rulings. Most of them would forget her name. But somewhere in the years ahead, on some sidewalk she would never see, one of them would ask a calm question and reach for a pencil, and that, she thought, was the whole point of teaching anybody anything.