Grace and Grit (24 page)

I belabor these dry, often tedious points because the judicial process would become for me a quagmire of interpreting and reinterpreting the intricacies of these laws. It’s also important to note the ripple effect sex discrimination had on my career and the devastating consequences for my income and quality of life. Goodyear effectively relegated me to being a second-class citizen for the rest of my life.

A
FTER DISCOVERY
ended, Goodyear filed a Motion for Summary Judgment to dismiss the lawsuit on all claims; this, Jon assured me, was typical in discrimination cases. Our case was before a magistrate judge, John Ott. Judge Ott issued a Report and Recommendation that recommended granting Summary Judgment on all claims except the three-day suspension for the tire hold. He reasoned that on this claim I’d offered sufficient evidence by citing
several incidents in which other employees who were responsible for tire holds weren’t suspended as I was. We appealed the rest of his ruling to an Article III judge and caught our first break.

Judge U. W. Clemon was Alabama’s first African American federal judge and had a long history as a civil rights activist. He was randomly selected to review the magistrate judge’s order and try the case. On July 31, 2002, Judge Clemon overruled Judge Ott’s Report and Recommendation. He kept the Title VII discriminatory pay claim that I was discriminated against for being a woman, the age discrimination claim, the retaliatory refusal to rehire claim, and the unfair suspension claim. He agreed with the magistrate judge’s decision to throw out the retaliatory evaluation and transfer claim, the constructive discharge claim, the lack-of-training claim, and the pay-discrimination claim falling under the Equal Pay Act. Later, after all was said and done, there would be criticism that this case wasn’t handled properly because the pay claim under the Equal Pay Act wasn’t included, but it was. Judge Clemon upheld Judge Ott’s ruling to throw it out, but we had a pay claim under Title VII that allowed us to move forward. Interestingly, the pay claim under the EPA has a more difficult standard for proving discrimination in jobs with similar working conditions and performed with equally substantial work than the 1964 Civil Rights Act does.

The trial date was set for January 21, 2003, Jon’s thirty-ninth birthday, and after his fourth child’s due date.

The majority of cases like mine settle out of court, a situation that can occur at any point in the process. Three weeks before the trial date, we met with the Goodyear attorney, Jay St. Clair, to mediate the case. Fern Singer, a well-known employment attorney who’d mediated hundreds of cases, attempted to mediate a negotiated settlement. To no avail.

Goodyear offered what my counsel deemed an insufficient amount. They also offered to rehire me two days a week for two years, working with a human resources manager named Thomas
they knew I liked. I suspected those two days would amount to my sweeping lampblack in the mill room on Saturday and Sunday. I also knew that Thomas was due for a transfer, which happened shortly after the mediation.

At one point during our preparation for the mediation, Fern commented, “The law is frequently an ass.” I didn’t quite know what she meant, but I assure you, by the time I reached the end of this long road, I understood it well. All I knew after the mediation was that I wanted what I’d already earned, not the pittance they’d offered.

B
Y THE
time the trial rolled around, I’d called more than one hundred people to ask them to testify on my behalf. Mostly I was turned down. The reasons varied: They couldn’t afford to lose their jobs, they wanted to avoid controversy, they were afraid of placing themselves and their families at risk in a town where Goodyear was the nerve center. We scrounged up four witnesses: Sharon; Rodney; Karen, a former manager; and Joe, a union pipefitter. All but Karen still worked at the plant, so they were taking a huge personal risk by testifying, and I knew way back then I couldn’t ever repay them for their commitment to this case. I worried after they testified they’d all be forced to quit, but that didn’t stop them from agreeing. There was no hesitation on their part, no abrupt no, no hanging up in my face, no “I’ll think about it.”

Jon’s task was to prove through both direct and circumstantial evidence that my claims were true. Direct evidence could be documents, what people said, actual salary differences; circumstantial evidence required the jurors to infer that something was indeed a conclusive fact, and usually required eliminating all other possible explanations of the question: Why was I, one of the only female managers in Goodyear’s history with hundreds of male employees, making so much less?

Jon figured that Goodyear would argue that I was making less
because I was a poor performer. On this issue we had the burden of proof; we had to show that I was discriminated against through the evidence we gathered in discovery.

For several weeks before the trial, I spent every day with Jon at his office preparing. He explained in great detail the significance of each exhibit and made sure I understood the legal language pertaining to the damages. We would run through the witness list discussing who might say what. We practiced what it would be like when I was on the witness stand by rehearsing questions he would ask me as well as what the defense could throw at me. “Stick to the truth,” he reminded me, “and you’ll do fine.”

But many nights before the trial I stayed awake worrying. If I lost in court, I had no idea whether or not Goodyear could hold me accountable financially. I was scared we’d lose our house, and the fear inside me sat heavy and thick. During those sleepless nights, Charles would hear me rustling around in the den, flipping channels. He’d come in and sit next to me on the sofa. He’d wrap his arm around me, asking, “Are you sure you know what you’re doing?”

I’d involuntarily pull away from him. I’m not much of a physically affectionate person to begin with, but when I’m agitated—the reason I was up in the middle of the night in the first place was that I’d gotten us into such a mess—I need some breathing room. “No. I have no idea what I’ve gotten myself into.”

He’d move back next to me, ignoring the careful distance I tried to maintain between myself and the world. “You don’t have to go through all of this.”

“We’re too far into it, and too many people are counting on us. I have to go through with it. I can’t let it go. We can’t let people do me, do us, like that.” I kept clicking the TV remote held rigidly in front of me as I searched for something to distract me in the flickering light of late-night TV.

Charles would get up and fix his bowl of Frosted Flakes, and we’d switch between the two shopping channels until we went back
to bed. I can’t imagine another man in the world who would have stood by me like Charles did.

T
HE DAY
of the trial was finally upon us. How would my experience at Goodyear be summarized in a few days in the courtroom? It seemed as impossible as squeezing someone’s life into a newspaper snippet on the obituary page. The night before the trial, I prayed and reviewed my five-hundred-page deposition. All that mattered, I reminded myself, was what I knew in my heart was true—what was right. I remembered what I had been through. I knew that whatever would happen in court would be nothing like what I’d dealt with before.

That morning I dressed in black slacks and a blue shirt as if I was going to work, with the one addition of a black jacket, in deference to Jon’s request that I dress up. Jon wanted me to wear a skirt and heels to trial, but I dressed like I did every day as an area manager in the tire room. I always wore black pants, to hide the grease stains, and on most days, a blue shirt. During the trial, I wasn’t trying to be someone else. I was simply trying to get back what I’d rightfully earned doing the job I’d been hired to do.

O
N A
bitterly cold January 21, 2003, after we drank an entire pot of coffee, Charles and I drove to the Anniston courthouse.

After parking in front of the two-story stone-and-brick courthouse on Noble Street, Charles paused inside the car a minute, letting the engine run, the heat still blowing on us.

He turned to me. “Well, this is it. This is what we’ve been working toward for a long time.”

I nodded and rubbed my hands together. “It’s here now,” I said, putting on my warm gloves. The courthouse’s white Corinthian columns loomed before us.

He leaned over and kissed my forehead, then turned off the engine and gave me a quick pat on the back.

“It’s time to see how it goes.” He opened his door, and a blast of cold air smelling like the car’s exhaust fumes enveloped us.

When Charles and I went inside the courtroom, we sat on the benches behind the table where Jon was sitting; the sleekly dressed defense attorneys, Jay St. Clair and Ronald Kent, had staked out the table next to the jury box. Suited for battle, his leather shoes shining, Mr. St. Clair looked through his notes. Mr. Kent, a young, clean-cut man, chatted with the human resources manager at Goodyear, a man I liked and got along with, who sat between them at their table.

Earlier, Jon had wheeled in several flimsy brown boxes spilling over with documents. They looked a bit tattered. He had also arranged several large charts near the shaky easel. I hoped it wouldn’t topple over in the small courtroom. To our relief, Jon’s partner Mike Quinn showed up at the very last minute.

One thing we had going for us was the fact that Jon and Mike made such a good team; they complemented each other well. A short man in his sixties, Mike was a veteran attorney with an open manner. He spoke with extraordinary ease, and I got the impression that, as gregarious as he was, he was comfortable talking to people from all walks of life. He seemed like he would be as much at home shooting the breeze with a neighbor on the front porch as he would dealing with corporate heads in the boardroom. Jon was more reserved, and the most driven, hardworking individual I’d ever met. He was relentless in his focus and pursuit of justice. If anybody could win this case, I believed it was Jon, though he was worried that the jury wouldn’t take too kindly to a Jewish lawyer—in the heart of a rural county he could be seen as just another liberal do-gooder from out of town telling the locals how to run their business.

Before jury selection, Judge Clemon urged Mr. St. Clair and Mr. Kent to settle the case. They made an offer, but it was too low.

Once the jury selection began, men and women from the surrounding
counties filed into the courtroom. One woman who was around my age looked like she could be my sister—the defense eventually eliminated her as one of their three strikes. The group was asked questions you would expect—whether anyone knew me or my family or had worked at Goodyear. Then the questions ranged from what their favorite TV shows were to whether they owned businesses, held management positions, and believed men should be paid more than women. An hour later a jury of seven was struck. The course of the remaining years of my life rested in the hands of seven strangers. Jury duty was probably the last thing in the world they wanted to do. Until now I’d always viewed it as an inconvenience. Never again.

Trying not to stare at them, I wondered what opinions they’d already formed of me, of Jon and Mike, of the Goodyear team. At first glance, I was most intrigued by the young man in his forties who was a nurse. I wondered if the young, heavyset woman and the middle-aged working woman—the only two women in the group—had had any experiences similar to mine. An older man who’d retired recently from a paper company looked like he could have been buddies with some of the Goodyear men outside in the hallway. There was no way to know how and what they might think and feel about me or my testimony.

O
NCE THE
jury settled into the jury box, I was called as the first witness. Stepping onto the stand, I faced Mr. St. Clair and his team on my immediate left. I was as far away as I could be from Jon and Mike. The empty balcony across from me, the high vaulted ceilings, and the wood paneling reminded me of the courtroom in the movie
To Kill a Mockingbird
. A lot had changed in the South since 1936, when that story took place; this time it was the judge, not the defendant, who was an African American. We would soon find out whether attitudes about women had changed significantly in north Alabama.

Opening first, Jon stood before me to begin his questioning. For a brief moment, I was flooded with a terrible foreboding, the sense that I’d made an awful mistake, done something foolish like lighting a cigarette next to a gas pump. Once Jon started asking me questions, my sense of doom slowly lifted. I kept my gaze steady on him pacing the room, every once in a while running his hand over the top of his cropped hair when he paused, thinking, before another question. Anchored by his confidence and determination, I answered him.

Jon first asked me to discuss the progression of positions I’d held throughout my career in general and at Goodyear. In the course of this description, he established that I was a high achiever, noting the objective ranking as the second-highest out of almost one hundred employees who’d taken an electrical and mechanical test in 1985 when the scope of the area manager’s duties broadened at the plant. He also wanted to know about the end of my career when I was supervised by the plant manager who had said the plant didn’t need women because we caused problems.

He let those words linger for a moment before he asked if anything else was said. Mr. St. Clair, who throughout the trial would jump up unexpectedly like a jack-in-the-box to object, made his first objection but was overruled.

“One of my former bosses who had been a business-center manager told me that he asked Eddie, ‘When are you going to get rid of the drunk and that damn woman?’ ” I answered.

After Jon asked how many other women managers were at Goodyear when I was working at the end—I knew of none—he offered as his first exhibit a pay chart for my beginning salary; it showed my salary along with those of the five men I started with in 1979. Mr. St. Clair tried to object, stating that the pay chart wasn’t relevant because those salary decisions were made so long ago, but again he was overruled. Jon stood next to the chart, blown up so
everyone could see the numbers, while the jury was given a sheet of paper with the same information.