Grace and Grit (25 page)

As the chart indicated, we’d all made the same amount on April 1, 1979, and continued to earn the same salaries, $18,216.96, a few months later in October, after we’d all received a raise.

Jon continued to ask me questions about my experiences over nineteen years at Goodyear. He showed that when I complained at the end of my career about the memo addressed to “Boys,” it was shortly afterward that I was told that I needed to apply for the technology engineer opening. After I was transferred to technology engineer, I was replaced by a young man who was promoted from being a union tire builder. The exhibit Jon offered outlined the difference in our pay.

This young man, still in his twenties, had started in 1994, and less than ten years later his salary was almost double mine, at over $81,000; after almost twenty years, when I retired, I was making $44,724.

Jon wound down his direct examination, asking me how it felt to be paid less, to be punished for the tire hold, to be transferred to a physically grueling job. He ended his questioning by inquiring whether I’d gone over the back-pay calculations with the paralegal, comparing my salary with that of the other folks I worked with. I had.

“Who was ranked lower than you on many occasions?”

“Matt Brown.” He’d been hired at the same time I was, and though he was ranked lower, he was paid significantly more.

A
T THE
end of Jon’s questioning, I wondered how in the world the jury could keep up with all of the information. We had jumped from one department to another and one manager to another, skipping all over the place. The pieces of this puzzle seemed too hard to fit together, but I knew Jon had to cover all areas of evidence supporting
our position. I hoped the jurors could make the right connections because I could barely sort through it all, and I was the one who’d lived it.

Then Mr. St. Clair stood up and walked toward me smiling. I took a deep breath.

He began by asking me if I was as qualified as a man who had been called back as an area manager after the 1998 buyout.

He was trying to get me to say I was as qualified so he could prove all the ways I wasn’t. “I could do my job,” I answered.

Then he asked me to define a tire hold and asked didn’t I scrap $10,000 worth of tires?

He wanted yes or no answers, so I could not offer an explanation to establish the context of the situation. I felt like I was playing a game of dodge, not dodging the truth but avoiding setting myself up for him to distort my truth. “I don’t know. I didn’t see the tires. I didn’t see the paperwork. They didn’t show them to me.”

“You don’t deny that?”

“I can’t admit to it, because I didn’t see the paperwork. See, that’s what scared me so much. You know, when we had—when I had builders that had scrap, especially if it was ten thousand dollars’ worth—even if it was two tires, four hundred dollars’ worth—I’d carry them out on the dock or carry them to shipping, we would examine them, see why it’s scrap and what we need to do to correct it.”

Next he jumped to my transfer: Weren’t you told you were on a long list of layoffs? The implication being that I was lucky to be transferred at all.

I replied, “I didn’t hear ‘long list.’ ”

In an exaggerated, indignant voice, he picked up my deposition. “Don’t you remember I took your deposition?” He flipped to a page. “And do you recall you were placed under oath?”

“Yes, sir.”

He turned to a page and made me read out loud what I’d said,
which was that I was on a long list of layoffs in 1997. But that’s not what he’d asked me. He’d asked me whether I’d been told by Eddie that I was on a long list. I hadn’t been told that in those exact words. He was playing games, twisting things just enough to make it so confusing that I looked like I was lying. He did this the entire time. He wanted the jury to think I was making things up. When he berated me so intensely about the details of the 1986 and 1997 layoffs, Judge Clemon finally said, “Are you about finished along this line?”

By the end of the first day, I was ready to step off the stand. Before I could help myself, I’d gotten testy with Mr. St. Clair too many times. It was hard to tell from anyone’s expressions how things were going. Charles and Phillip sat behind Jon and Mike (Vickie would come the next day), but they didn’t register much emotion as we all endured the punishing atmosphere of that initial day in court.

That night when Charles and I walked into the kitchen after a long, quiet ride home, I flipped on the light, glancing at the clock. It was time for our show to come on.

“Hey,
Law & Order
is on tonight,” I automatically reminded him like I always did.

He gave me a halfhearted smile. “No, thanks. I’ve had enough of courtroom drama for one day, thank you very much.”

Unable to go to bed right away, we watched an old dance video instead.

T
HE FIRST
thing the next morning I returned to the stand and that sly Mr. St. Clair focused immediately on the tire hold again.

“You admit to making an error in regards to the tire hold, don’t you, Mrs. Ledbetter?”

The words stumbled from my mouth as I tried to make him understand my point: When I said that I couldn’t answer, my words were based on what I was told, not on what I believed I had
done. Judge Clemon stopped me with a simple “All right.” I looked over at Charles. His expression didn’t change, but he gave me a slight nod as if to reassure me and encourage me to stay strong. I recrossed my legs to regain my composure.

Mr. St. Clair moved on, referring to Eddie. “You can’t say he didn’t like you because of what happened twenty years ago—he sent you a nice note in 1992, didn’t he?” he asked. Yes, it was a congratulatory note. Then in a tone one uses when trying to explain a very simple idea to a confused child, Mr. St. Clair continued his questioning, implying that in 1997, when Eddie could have laid me off, in a magnanimous gesture he transferred me to the technology engineer position. In other words, this generous, kind man was really looking out for my best interests, and I was too dumb to see it.

“Many people think this technology engineer job is a good job, don’t they? Now, I know you said that you didn’t think it was a good job, but that’s not what everyone in the plant thought, was it?” he continued. “There were people who wanted those jobs.” He picked up my deposition as if brandishing a weapon. He plucked a single line from the impossibly thick book and read my observation to the jury that one man thought my job as technology engineer was better than his job working in the pits; he’d remarked to me one day that it was a great injustice to him that I had gotten the position.

I was getting aggravated again. “I don’t think so. I think he’s the only one.”

He wielded my deposition again. “Look with me, please, ma’am, at page 243 of your deposition.” He stopped to remind the jury that I had said these words “under oath” before he read that I said that a lot of people who had harder jobs in that department viewed the position I had as better; it was a promotion in their eyes, not a demotion as it had been for me.

Satisfied with his point, he turned to the pay chart and started
nitpicking about the fact that all the men with higher salaries did not start at the exact same time I did, as I’d said. He showed their employee records and their start dates. What he was saying didn’t make sense, though. These men all started in management around the same time I did. He was going to ridiculous means to prove that my claims were not based in the truth. And the truth, I worried, was only what the defense attorneys, as charming as snake-oil salesmen, convinced the jury to believe.

During Mr. St. Clair’s harangue about the exact start dates, Judge Clemon finally interrupted to ask, “Isn’t the relevant history when they were hired in the supervisory position?”

So Mr. St. Clair switched his focus to the year 1981, when Goodyear implemented a merit-based program to replace the cost-of-living raises they’d given in prior years. I didn’t know it at the time, but it was only after this program was implemented that my pay and that of the other managers began to diverge. But now, through the discovery process, I’d seen my peers’ raises and compared them with mine.

Mr. St. Clair proceeded to explain each of my raises over the years, trying to show there wasn’t any discrimination involved, but I disputed his conclusion each time. I knew, in doing so, that I was being combative and probably alienating the jury, but I was compelled to correct his distortion.

Skipping to the 1998 EEOC complaint, he inquired why nothing about Jeff’s sexual harassment was included, insisting that the current lawsuit was the first time I’d mentioned Jeff’s renewed harassment.

“And do you know why Jeff wasn’t in court today?” he asked.

I knew.

“And why can’t he be here?” he said slowly, as if I had done something to prevent him from appearing.

“He died of lung cancer.”

“That’s all I have.”

He was clearly trying to make it look like I fabricated this harassment charge because Jeff wasn’t there to defend himself. What he failed to inform the jury was that Jeff had died shortly before the trial; Goodyear had had plenty of time to take his deposition but chose not to.

M
R
. S
T
. Clair’s examination had opened the door for Jon to address the details surrounding my 1982 EEOC complaint. The defense attorney had let his guard down, and all the information blacked out on that 1982 EEOC exhibit now came to light. In Jon’s short redirect he explained the reasons for the EEOC charge and why, fearing repercussions, I didn’t go into detail about Jeff’s recent misbehavior in 1996. He recounted Dennis’s behavior and Jeff’s poor evaluation of me when I wouldn’t go to the Ramada Inn with him. Even though it had happened a long time earlier, hearing Jon describe it made me feel as if it had just happened.

Jon entered the initial EEOC complaint as an exhibit and pointed out how my raises before the 1982 complaint were higher than any other raises I received in my Goodyear career. He also clarified what Mr. St. Clair had tried to distort: that the Top Performance Award was, according to the employee handbook, an award, not just a raise. Goodyear couldn’t justify its position that I was such a poor performer, since I’d received this award. I wondered if they would call my former workers to the stand to claim that I was a bad manager.

M
IKE
Q
UINN
called Dr. Judy Cook to testify on my behalf. I was used to seeing Dr. Cook in one setting, her small office, and here, a short, older woman, she looked out of place. When she addressed the stigma often attached to seeking psychological counsel, I felt the stigma, all right. I stared straight ahead, embarrassed when she said she’d diagnosed me with depression and prescribed medication for it.

Dr. Cook indicated how stressed I was from work, that my stress came from working in isolation, from my knee injury, and from my mother’s illness and difficult nature. I’d never talked about Edna to anyone but Charles and Dr. Cook. As frustrating as Edna could be, she was still my mother, and it was painful to sit there while a room full of strangers heard about my tangled relationship with her. In the privacy of Dr. Cook’s office, the anxieties and fears I’d revealed had seemed contained and examined in a respectful manner. Now they were public record, and I was ashamed.

With Dr. Cook’s notes from our counseling sessions in hand, Mr. St. Clair asked her if I’d had a choice about transferring to the technology engineer job.

She said I hadn’t.

Hadn’t I had headaches all my life, Mr. St. Clair pushed, and been diagnosed with depression before? I guessed he was trying to show through his punishing scrutiny that I was unstable. He must have read in Dr. Cook’s notes what I’d told her when she asked about my medical history: that I’d had blinding headaches as a child, and the headaches had cropped up again early in my marriage when Charles and I had struggled to get by, right before I decided to start working again. The only other time I’d taken medication besides the antidepressant Dr. Cook temporarily prescribed me was when I’d been prescribed Prozac in the late eighties after starting back to Goodyear.

Mr. St. Clair did his best to say I’d given conflicting stories to Dr. Cook about my Goodyear history. She shook her head. No, the threads of my story were simply hard to piece together, she said.

That was an understatement.

Referring to the point when I’d started seeing her in the spring of 1998, after being transferred to the technology engineer position, she commented, “I would say that at that point in time, she was so stressed she was a little like a cat that just had its tail stuck in a 220 socket.”

Not a real pretty description but, unfortunately, an accurate one, and it explained the reason for the uncontrollable screaming rages that I’d started experiencing my last few years at Goodyear.

But not so, Mr. St. Clair insisted; I was glad to be laid off. He elaborated this point at great length, reading from Dr. Cook’s notes about my feelings and struggles with my mother. Listening to this, I wished I’d never gone down this path. During a trial, there’s no time to absorb what’s happening because the momentum of questioning rushes forward as furiously and inevitably as a swollen river after a hard rain. And I didn’t understand what Mr. St. Clair was trying to accomplish—that is, until he asked if all my feelings about Goodyear weren’t really just a transference of my feelings about my mother.

Dr. Cook disagreed.

Mr. St. Clair wrapped up with a final grand gesture, directing Dr. Cook to read the last sentence in her notes from my visit following Edna’s death—I’d seen her only a few more times after I retired. He handed Dr. Cook the notes she’d typed three years earlier. She took a minute to find the sentence before she read: “She realizes her mother was even harder to please than Goodyear.”

K
AREN, A
woman in her late fifties who’d been hired at Goodyear in 1976, walked toward the stand. She’d worked briefly, from 1993 to 1995, as an area manager at the plant before she left for good. She was now a supervisor at Honda. Her immediate testimony confirmed my similar experience when she explained that her evaluations “stunk.” Far from a pushover, Karen had complained about the evaluations but was told, “That’s just the way it is.”