The Beloved World of Sonia Sotomayor: Chapters 7–12

My mother’s biggest fear was the threat of amputations, blindness, and a panoply of other complications that were then typical.

If I stubbed my toe, she’d be yelling about gangrene.

Eventually, I would translate my family’s fatalism into an outlook that better suited my temperament: I probably wasn’t going to live as long as most people, I figured. So I couldn’t afford to waste time.

Okay, so I couldn’t be a police officer or a detective, but it occurred to me that the solution to my quandary appeared on that small black-and-white screen every Thursday night.

Most of all it was the judge who fascinated me. A minimal but vital presence, he was more of an abstraction than a character: a personification of justice.

We tracked each other’s trespasses, we snitched to Mami, or threatened to, whichever availed the greater advantage. Our snitching often entailed phone calls to the hospital that must have driven my mother nuts, not to mention her supervisors, bless their forbearance.

I was often moved and excited by books, but how often does a newspaper article give you chills? I had to look up unfamiliar words—“ecumenism,” “vernacular”—but all his impulses resonated deeply with me.

“So who did I cheat from?” I asked indignantly. “Who else got a hundred that I could have copied from?”

She looked flummoxed for a moment. “But you’ve never scored higher than eighties or low nineties on the practice tests. How could you get a hundred?”

When we were little, Miriam always found a thousand reasons to say no to any new game or plan that I suggested. Eventually, she would agree, but it was such an effort cajoling her.

One evening at United Bargains, the women were making crank calls, dialing random numbers out of the phone book. If a woman’s voice answered, they acted as if they were having an affair with the woman’s husband, then howled with laughter at their poor gull’s response.

Titi Carmen would join in, taking her turn on the phone and laughing as long and hard as any of them. I couldn’t understand how anyone could be so cruel—so arbitrarily, pointlessly cruel.

My mother was eager to get us into a safer place because the Bronxdale projects were headed downhill fast. Gangs were carving up the territory and each other, adding the threat of gratuitous violence to the scourges of drugs and poverty.

My mother was eager to get us into a safer place because the Bronxdale projects were headed downhill fast. Gangs were carving up the territory and each other, adding the threat of gratuitous violence to the scourges of drugs and poverty.

I would shake my head when they tried to engage me in Yiddish. “What, no Yiddish? A nice Jewish girl like you?” I heard that so often that I knew the routine: my boss would explain with a bit of Yiddish I did recognize. “Shiksa” was technically derogatory, but she said it so affectionately that I couldn’t fault it.

And to say Titi Aurora was frugal would be an understatement. I don’t think she ever spent a penny on her own pleasure or bought anything that wasn’t strictly necessary.

Neither of them showed affection, and Titi especially could be austere and forbidding, but it was also clear that they were bound to each other in a way that I didn’t entirely understand.

I learned that when Marguerite’s parents married, in their communities a match between a German and a Pole was virtually miscegenation.

Beyond the very circumscribed world of my family and our few blocks of the South Bronx, a much wider world was opening up to me, if only in a New York sort of way.

I noticed too that the mishigas on display in the hallways of Co-op City or at Zaro’s more than matched the volubility of Puerto Rican family life, but if we’d slung the kinds of insults that our Jewish neighbors regularly did, the dishonor and acrimony would have stuck for generations.

I noticed too that the mishigas on display in the hallways of Co-op City or at Zaro’s more than matched the volubility of Puerto Rican family life, but if we’d slung the kinds of insults that our Jewish neighbors regularly did, the dishonor and acrimony would have stuck for generations.

She warned us against getting stuck in rote learning, about how we needed to master abstract, conceptual thinking.

She was a teacher but still educating herself, learning about the world and actively engaged in it. I began to have an intimation that education could be for something other than opening the doors of job opportunity, in the sense of my mother’s constant refrain.

The dozen or so girls on the team were an especially interesting bunch of self-selected high-functioning nerds, and Kenny coached us in debate and extemporaneous speech.

His mind was an analytic machine that could dismantle an opponent’s position, step by inexorable step.

And he was utterly untainted by emotion. I aspired to Ken’s unflappable, rational cool, though I feared that I came across more like Titi Gloria in the usual nervous tizzy that accompanied her every mundane decision—red dress or blue?

“Sonia, I don’t care if you have to cut off your hands, get that gesture out of your repertoire!" That was Kenny ringside. Tell a Puerto Rican not to talk with her hands? Ask a bird not to fly.

She even cursed the principal to his face in the cafeteria when he caught her holding hands with her boyfriend. Ken had to tax his mighty rhetorical powers to win her a reprieve.

Ken claimed they were the only Chinese family in the barrio, and he was a barrio kid through and through, slamming down dominoes with the best of them.

When I was little, listening and watching for cues had seemed like the key to survival in a precarious world.

“Thirty-eight neighbors did nothing. How does this happen? It happens when we become apathetic about our roles in society. It happens when we forget that we are a community, that we are connected to one another and have an obligation to engage with other human beings.”

The college campus where the 1970 movie was set, supposedly Harvard, seemed a wonderland. Set among pristine snowy fields, here was a cathedral of learning whose denizens lived out what seemed like an antiquarian fantasy, debating under pointy arches, scaling book-lined walls, and lounging on leather couches.

The college campus where the 1970 movie was set, supposedly Harvard, seemed a wonderland. Set among pristine snowy fields, here was a cathedral of learning whose denizens lived out what seemed like an antiquarian fantasy, debating under pointy arches, scaling book-lined walls, and lounging on leather couches.

A couple of pages of the book were devoted to each college: a mission statement in blandly aspirational code, a few statistics, generic black-and-white photographs of students looking earnestly engaged.

Soon, those fat envelopes I came to recognize as acceptance packages stuffed the mailbox almost daily. Now that the choice was real and imminent, I sat down to more serious deliberation.

There was neo-Gothic architecture aplenty, but the campus was no idyllic haven set apart from the world. Harvard and Radcliffe were fused with Cambridge, densely urban, tangled with honking traffic.

They were just lapdogs, really, one black and one white, but they scared me. She called to them, and they scrambled onto the white couch and sat beside her, and there the three of them completed a surreal tableau, three pairs of eyes gazing at me, a vision in black and white.

When I arrived at the station in New Haven, an old hand at Amtrak by now, the two Latino students sent to pick me up said they were coming from a campus protest. Eager to jump back into the fray, they apologized, saying that they would just be dropping me off for now.

Yes, I’d experienced prejudice aimed straight at me, from the blatant taunts of my street-fighting days to the cold shoulder of Kevin’s mom, to the subtler barb from the school nurse more recently.

Even the bronze tigers flanking the entrance to ivy-covered Nassau Hall, while reminding me of the stone lions that guard the New York Public Library, seemed more pensive and more elegant.