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Volume 7, Fall 1997 reprinted by permission of the author JOHNNY MACK BROWN Mae Kuykendall* Consider the case of one woman, who as a girl growing up in Texas imagined herself as a cowboy hero, wearing a bandana around her neck, riding the range, and being kind to all. How might a girl cowboy do in a big law firm? Suppose the firm is in New York. Suppose the girl never got over the pure joy of being a cowboy in a little town in Texas in the fifties, where choices for women were limited but a little girl could do and say anything and get a hearing. Let us hear what she has to say, with a few of her present-day reflections thrown in, too: I punched the dirty little boy because he tried to take my toy. We fell into a tangle of fists and feet. I hit him and kicked him and discovered the struggle for leverage. I kept jumping out of the tangle to pull up the sleeve of my overalls. Each time I had to fight with one hand until I could get him down. I did not mind getting hit, because I was hitting him more and hitting him harder. My mother glanced out the window and thought to herself, "I'm so glad. Mae will fight for what's hers. What a relief!" I was probably four when I began to fight. My family was living temporarily in a trailer park in Velasco, Texas, a city now a part of the less distinctively named Freeport. My brother, who was two and a half years older, and I discovered that some rough children planned to lay claim to anything our parents gave us. A bunch of bigger kids even told us that we could not use the swing set that my father built for us. They shook their fists in warning. I sensed a size difference, a class distinction, and something having to do with boys and girls that made their threat of force the last word, despite a bluster that I vaguely recognized as a coward's calling card. My brother's inclinations were pacifistic, joined with an instinctive indifference to possessions. So, later on, my mother breathed a sigh of relief when she looked out the window and saw her little girl in a fight, heedless of injury or dirt. It was a good beginning for a girl born in South Texas in 1947, a girl who was headed for Harvard Law School and a New York law practice. But before I got anywhere outside Velasco or Clute City, a town ten miles from Velasco to which my family moved next, I found a psychological foothold in the world of the Old West and modern celebrity. At the age of six, I stood by my bed and felt the courage of my soul and the grandeur of my life overflow with the conviction that I was Johnny Mack Brown, a movie cowboy and star football player. Johnny Mack Brown's essence and mine had merged in a mysterious moment. I loved to say his name out loud. His dash thrilled me, representing human perfection for a girl in my circumstances, not to pursue, but to be. I think I knew then that he had been a star football player before he was a cowboy. It was hard for me to distinguish a character from an actor. Indeed, before we knew better, my brother and I grieved for all the actors who had to die to make good cowboy movies. We thought the first movie we saw on television was fun, but worried that we should not enjoy something that cost so many lives. With Johnny Mack Brown, the riches were so great I had no concern about the cost to him of altering reality, sure that he could be an actor, a football player, a cowboy, and a little girl in Texas- with plenty of glory left to spare and no damage to his hold on who he was. He had a generous, noble spirit because the part of him in Texas did, and that part had no problem with sharing. I took to wearing a neck scarf. I strode through my days in Clute City with verve and daring, my bold sense of myself only slightly diminished by my mother's nagging reminder, "It's pretend." I told her, "No, I am Johnny Mack Brown." I was in a protected zone, a small company town where the impression you made could be odd but never a disaster. For some years, I followed my instincts and people took notice. The area newspaper, called The Daily Facts Review of Brazosport, published my essay "A Rainy Day" in 1953, when I was in the second grade. My essay was the best girl's effort on that topic among the second graders in the Clute City elementary school. Almost 40 years later, my mother dug my original copy of the essay out of her trunk, where she keeps objects she judges to be part of an irretrievable and arguably tragic past of anguishing transitions, from bad to good and from good to bad, from Texas as it was to Texas as it is. The Clute City school authorities, living an existence headed in part for my mother's trunk, had written "girl" at the top of the sheet of coarse Indian Chief tablet paper. In my view today, and in their's then, the essay did not speak for itself in small-town America gender conventions of the 1950s, so somebody marked it to prevent confusion. The essay, written with a pleasant combination of poetry and logic read: It rains many days.The publication was an important event for someone who would spend her life writing for a living in one way or another; it even foreshadowed my attempts to evade expectations relating to gender. The experience of selection and publication taught me some lessons, not all good, about the rewards of being recognized as a writer and the unpredictable effect one's self conception can have on others. At the time my essay was selected, and when it was published, my family was not in town. My father had agreed to leave Clute City, a little industrial town that served as home for Dow Chemical Company workers, and go back home, briefly, to the ranch country near Cotulla to help his father with the annual branding and deticking of the cattle. As a result of our family's rare indulgence in a nomadic episode, complete with range fires and temporary tents, none of us saw my work in print. Upon our return, Mrs. Moody, my second grade teacher, stopped by to welcome us home and reported my glimmer of celebrity to my mother and me. In a moment of casual but pleasant revelation, she enabled me to see my merit. She also raised an issue. Standing in our living room as an unofficial emissary of the future, she loomed as someone with a worldly connection. The formality with which my mother, and other adults in Texas, treated one another felt, in the case of Mrs. Moody, like recognition extended to a dignitary from outside and returned by her to my mother. I loved Mrs. Moody for her gentle spirit. But in the course of hearing what I had done, I learned that the event of my publication was a small one for Mrs. Moody and none at all for me. No one saved the clipping for me, not even Mrs. Moody, who said it was just such a perfect description of the scene in her house on a rainy day. I liked the idea that I had captured something she understood, but I also felt that something private and poetic had been stolen and made ordinary. What I really wanted to say to Mrs. Moody about her comment was something like, "Well, no. My writing belongs to me. It is about me, not about you, your two sons, your house or your husband. I am not like you. Neither is my parents' house like your house nor my rainy day like your sons'." My love, Mrs. Moody, and the rest of Clute City had made of my text what they chose, treating its publication as an incident worth a mention but not one requiring my participation. And, to my shock, the story was about them. This told me early that the printed word, and part of one's self, is insubstantial in the usual case. It was a child's insight that would bear up. Like the word in print, Johnny Mack Brown lacked real-world impact in Clute City, being relegated by my elders to categories that fit their less vivid slots for the stuff of the soul. In Clute City, girls were not really cowboys. Clute City adults loved me, but they did not believe me. They were not prepared to give full credit to the imagination of a girl who identified with heroes and aspired to a heroic persona instead of playing with dolls and aspiring to be a nurse. Later, I stumbled through experiments in finding a cultural niche as hospitable as my own childhood imagination. I had spent my childhood watching my father with admiration, marauding with boys, plundering the woods in Clute City for striplings to make homemade bows and arrows, falling on broken beer bottles while still rushing on with the battle plan at hand, playing ball all day, and reliving all night the ball's speeding flight toward me. On Saturdays my father and I had watched the fights together. The sound of the ringing bell called me to savagery and put sly grins on our faces, as we enjoyed the same imagined glory with a small sense of silliness and a large dollop of pure animal fun. We rooted for the fighter I chose and became passionate about his virtue. Any time of the week I followed my father around the yard, as he welded frames of trucks, fixed tires, and fashioned a physical mastery of his domain with a quiet concentration that cast a happy spell. Once he attached the wrong part to a wheel. When he exclaimed, his daughter, too respectful to have intervened but keenly watchful, told him, "I knew you were doing it wrong." I would have gladly learned all his skills in repairing cars, but I did not want grease on my hands. This was not a sign of gender loyalty, because I also avoided cooking to keep my hands clean and dry. I happily posed wearing my father's welding hood, with an acetylene torch ablaze in my hand. I also offered to help in the kitchen, but my mother always said, "It's easier to do it myself." I took after my brother in his indifference to male or female tasks. Perhaps we both had a bit of lack of concern for property. I think we both felt that nature and our parents intended a transition for us into a different sort of life, where we would be entitled to keep our heads in the clouds, and be rewarded for it. At Angleton High School, the simplicity of living in Clute City began to give way. My worst challenge, not counting intensified assaults on my imagination, was the scene in the locker room after a basketball game. Everyone else on my team spent a good ten to fifteen minutes applying lipstick, rouge and eye shadow, deploying mysterious apparatuses and procedures that had come into their possession without my knowing how or why. My teammates had come up with rules and rituals that puzzled and embarrassed me. It was hard to conceal the pain of my exclusion. I watched my teammate Laura struggle to apply lipstick, aiming herself at the mirror like a linebacker trying to take out opposing linemen, applying and reapplying a smear of color that refused to be anything but. By the end of her struggles, her elbows could have used some ice to relieve the ache that surely came of so many vain efforts from the arms of a sturdy farm girl on her uncooperative features. I imagined her wearing elbow guards for the job, but I don't think she really did. We didn't have trainers, but if we had, their skills would have been most needed by Laura--to avoid muscle fatigue in front of the mirror. Watching her exhausting and emotionally taxing effort to conform to the girls' locker room society in the early 1960s on the Gulf Coast of Texas left me sure of my decision to finesse the whole thing. Johnny Mack Brown was feeling a bit startled, but home after school, he was back on the range. As the years passed, good luck came my way. Women began wearing less makeup. Blue jeans became the garb of the campus. Women started getting jobs. Harvard Law School, which probably would not have admitted me when I was 22, saw me as a sure thing when I was 35. I wound up in New York City at a "white shoe" law firm, learning the meaning of the reference just soon enough to choose it over socially fractious law firms. At my firm, you could be sure you would never hear sexually crude remarks to put women in their place. The gendering of the firm was much grander than that. Female associates the firm liked had husbands the firm also liked. A partner exclaimed when one particular woman was mentioned, "Her husband is a symphony conductor!" The firm's ethos, like the rest of society, contained a strong alliance between girls with makeup and boys grabbing toys. For instance, the head of the corporate finance group had married the daughter of one of the name partners from the early days of the firm. Another powerful finance attorney had married the daughter of a founding partner. My male secretary, who knew everything, observed without sentiment that the marriage had to be an alliance. After all, their telephone conversations focused almost exclusively on family finances and drew energy from their mutual hatred. My secretary sniffed, calling it, "That happy little arrangement!" The female partners, of whom there were only five out of nearly 100, were married to, or daughters of, powerful men-or both. Despite these discernible outlines of a power structure lying behind the routines calling for technical mastery of legal tasks, I went about my business as if the placid surface of the legal waters was not moved by the powerful forces in the ocean depths. One could lose oneself in the work, flashing around in the middle of the night dispatching bands of youthful legal assistants, who played Corporate Deal with the same devotion my friends and I had once lavished on group efforts at war. We were racing to beat courier deadlines and shouting warnings at one another not to make fatal mistakes, like letting a typo slip through or sending our client's packet to the enemy. As in childhood, we were oblivious to personal pain and fatigue. For any associate, the stakes could theoretically be a partnership worth millions; those who did make partner were often noted for haranguing and starving legal assistants in the midnight hours, highhatting them in the daylight hours, and sabotaging other associates on a full-time basis. At another firm in town, the legend was you could reliably predict who would make partner if you put your money on associates who were universally hated by associates in the same class or below. But Johnny Mack Brown cared little for any of that. The stakes were honor. Despite my knowledge that victory was societal prestige and material wealth was the prize, I permitted myself a fantasy that a final reckoning need not come. For a while in the 80s it seemed possible: there was so much prosperity of such infinite duration in New York, and in law practice, that the provisional nature of a Johnny Mack Brown's stay at an East Coast firm might never mature to reality. While I recognized the prosperity as counterfeit, I tried to take refuge within it like the other associates in the cocoon of all- night marathons of work and common purpose. I thought it was easier to finesse the matter of gender at the firm than at Angleton High School. I was probably wrong. Our little towns love us more easily than we know. Institutions devoted to the production of wealth search out more information about us with a less generous interpretation of it than even our narrow-minded neighbors accord us. And, for some reason, wealth and imagination are not the closest allies. Wealth brooks no nonsense. And for some other reason, wealth and gender-based alliances bear a strong connection. Somehow, wealth and boy-girl alliances are where the nonsense stops and people get serious. A movie cowboy will be indulged only so far. The paraphernalia associated with the atmosphere in the girls' locker room at Angleton High School were not that prominent at my firm. No one was wearing pancake makeup. The differences in gender presentation among the women could be seen as subtle; there was no blatant sexual competition among women, no sense of war-paint pots at hand. The majority of women fretted about becoming expert at the work. Clothing discussions never happened, except when a female partner advised an ambitious associate to stop wearing black every day. But there was the undercurrent of social knowledge about alliances under the surface. Hints of something else, of Angleton High School, appeared when the firm held its biannual formal dinner dance, to which spouses and dates were invited. The unsexed workplace disappeared abruptly. Suddenly professional women became obsessed with appearance. The pressure was to have a successful prom, with a proper date and a striking dress. People asked me questions about my dress and hatched plans for their own. I could not imagine what to say. The misunderstanding seemed as great as the day that Mrs. Moody said that my rainy day was just like her family's. There were meanings attached to my persona by the readers that did not require my participation. On the night of the dance, women who toiled nightly in overheated conference rooms were gown-and date-proud, vying to make a splash. Women who competed, in subtle and civil ways at the firm, trying to do it all--run meetings better, receive higher profile deals, write the most eloquent pro bono briefs, produce more and better paper--were overtly on display, showing what they had, hoping with colored gowns and happy charms to dominate the night and win the partners' hand--in partnership. The presence of this type of occasional sexual dance complicated the ambitious woman associate's life more than that of the male associate. Certainly, it undermined the role that imagination could play in my inner life at the firm, or, at any rate, in my advancement at the firm. A lot of women wanted to talk about gender as something that needed more recognition so they could come into their own as women and lawyers. Toward the end of my stay, and in reaction to the intimations of gender unrest brought about by the reactions to Anita Hill, women partners took to calling meetings of women associates to announce that women did not do as well at the firm because recent studies revealed that women were different. A semi-public dialogue, controlled in the interest of the partners, began to emerge concerning the gender text of the firm. One woman partner pleasantly acknowledged that some of the male partners would not work with women associates. It was not clear from her tone who was to be faulted. You can imagine the effect on Johnny of hearing this sort of thing. It was hard to tell what the many extravagantly educated women of the firm thought of all this, as, upon their arrival from the leading educational institutions of the world, they began hearing from women partners official accounts of their gender deficiencies. Not only did the vaunted misuse by New York firms of our human capital proceed in the manner predicted by countless decriers of the waste of our cultural riches, in the case of women, the beneficiaries of the cultural waste threw in gratuitous insults. If the inner life of Walter Mitty is in trouble in a big law firm, consider Johnny Mack Brown sitting in a meeting run by the female partners at a law firm in New York City, as these guardians react to a group of women associates on the verge of tying bandanas around their necks and putting up their fists. In the meetings, a newly recruited associate--a Rhodes scholar whose inclination to weigh ideas and speak with care was likely to be evaluated as diffidence rather than gravitas--blinked, as she struggled to take in the sudden depreciation of her hoard of professional worth. But never mind her plight. I knew what I wanted. I was looking for a reprieve from the demands of gender, where I might do things my way-- treat people right and fall into a heap of fists and dust only as a last resort, given the demands of adult dignity. In my heart I was still Johnny Mack Brown. But the risk of challenge had left me less willing to stride around with a bandana tied to my neck, except by way of metaphor during the time between midnight and dawn. During those times, legal heroics made for fun and quips, and the fancy that nothing and everything was at risk became a way of being plucky. The fact is, none of us really has to leave Texas unless we choose to abandon the absolute best in us. *Professor of Law, Detroit College of Law at Michigan State University. J.D. 1985, Harvard University; Ph.D. 1980, University of North Carolina; M.A. 1972, University of North Carolina; B.A. 1969, University of Houston. The author wishes to thank Jacqueline Lapidus, Robert Rich, Cynthia Lee Starnes, and Cheryl Zupan for their comments and encouragement. She also wishes to thank her parents, Mary and Paul, for reasons this essay makes apparent. |
