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1. What was it that first attracted you to Dovey and to her story? How did you know this would make a great story to tell?
“There’s always somebody who would be the miracle-maker in your life, if you but believe.”
This statement, the caption for a Washington Post photograph of an eighty-year-old Washington lawyer named Dovey Roundtree, was my introduction to the woman with whom I wrote Justice Older than the Law. That 1995 Post article featured Dovey as the inspiration for a television character being developed by actress Cicely Tyson, but both her
words and her photograph stopped me for their sheer improbability. Here was a lawyer talking of miracles, a woman who spoke in the cadences of a Southern minister, an attorney who clearly had ideas about justice that reached beyond the courtroom. The improbability of it all struck me with such force that I called her that week, and after one conversation knew that I wanted – that I needed – to write her story.
That was the beginning of the 15-year collaboration that culminated in the creation of Justice Older than the Law, the story of her life. In that time, I have come to know a woman who is as remarkable for her spiritual depth as she is for her historic achievements. For me, a teller, most of all, of tales of improbable heroes and unconventional visionaries, this was the story of a lifetime.
Former Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor has called Dovey “a national treasure.” Actress Cicely Tyson has spoken of her as “astounding.” And her story itself is astounding. Born into poverty in the Jim Crow South, Dovey defied the realities of her time, carving out a place in history, first in the vanguard of black women in the military in World War II, and then as a lawyer who came of age on the cusp of the civil rights movement. Her life is an almost impossible journey through the highs and lows of this country’s history for nine decades, and to watch her in action is to see someone driven by a notion of justice that is older, by far, than the law.
When I first came to know her, I sought her out in her tiny office in a rowhouse in Northwest Washington, took note of the broken-down chairs and the clients who filled the waiting room. I learned quickly that they brought with them not only their legal troubles, but troubled spirits as well. “I make my clients my children,” she’d said in that 1995 Post article. “I can see stars where there’s nothing but a bunch of clay.”
Her story was much more than that of a unique lawyer, I found. I spent time in her home, with Dovey and her extended family, conducting hundreds of interviews, and when she retired to Charlotte, North Carolina in September 1996, I continued the interviewing process by long- distance phone, flying to Charlotte to see her whenever I could, and strengthening our bond of trust. In those years I learned that Dovey’s life transcends the particulars of her achievements. Her story is one of spiritual as well as historic dimension. In the hours when she told me about her grandmother, her upbringing, her deeply nuanced view of justice, I learned that more than anything, it is the breadth of her vision that makes her who she is. Her desire to “cure the aching heart, the bewildered soul,” as she once told me, to do what she calls “fix the brokenness,” is what convinced me that hers was a story that I wanted to tell. It is this vision – this ability to see stars in a lump of clay – that drew me, most of all, to Dovey.
2. Dovey is a woman of tales, and in the time you spent with her she told you a lot of them. What is your favorite story of hers?
Oh my goodness, I can’t pick a favorite! I can say, though, that all the stories I loved best from the day I first sat listening to Dovey are the stories about her beloved maternal grandmother, Grandma Rachel, who took her and her mother and sisters into the parsonage after Dovey’s father died in the influenza epidemic of 1919. She loved them and mothered them and disciplined them and taught them all the lessons of faith in God and of courage and goodness that Dovey would take with her into her adult life. I just couldn’t get enough of those “Grandma stories, ” and Dovey never tired of telling them to me and everybody else within earshot -- about little Dovey Mae and Grandma going out into the pre-dawn woods together to pick blackberries; about Grandma making lye soap over her cauldron from the fat drippings the neighbors brought her all year long; about Grandma whisking little Dovey off the segregated streetcar in Charlotte rather than endure the insults of the driver; about Grandma bathing Dovey in a big tin tub on the night her father died, singing hymns as she scrubbed her with her homemade lye soap and rubbed her dry and hugged her to her, driving out the sadness and the confusion and the pain that filled the house that night.
That bathing story is a kind of baptismal symbol, which is why it’s so powerful. It marked a critical passage of tiny little Dovey Mae out of darkness into light, and when the 85-year-old Dovey would tell it to me, her face would shine, and we’d savor it together and laugh, and Dovey would hum some of the hymns the way Grandma did when she was bathing her. I’m just old enough to have dim memories of being bathed in a great big tin tub at our beach cottage when I was a very little girl, and I could understand the comfort Dovey must have derived from that ritual. I saved that story for the end of the book’s last chapter because I felt it summed up all the comfort and the love that Dovey had gotten from her grandmother. But the place of honor – in other words, the final place in the book, in the Benediction after the final chapter -- I reserved for the blackberry picking at sunrise, because that is the symbol of hope and resurrection that has informed everything Dovey has done in her life.
I want to say something about the Grandma story that I chose to open the book – the wrenching and horrifying tale of how the white overseer stomped on her feet when she tried to escape his sexual advances. This cannot be called “a favorite story” because it’s so dark, so hideous, so filled with sadness. But it is central to the whole book because it speaks to Grandma’s courage and the way she passed it on to the tiny child, her beloved Dovey Mae. That’s why it’s the story I read each time I do presentations on the book. People are riveted by this passage, which unfolds with Dovey watching as Grandma would bathe her broken, scarred, twisted feet in steaming water every night and then rub them with homemade ointment. As Dovey grew older, she’d rub the salve into Grandma’s feet herself, taking great joy in being able to help her grandmother. It’s impossible not to see the Biblical connection in this story, because as Dovey told it, it was a highly ritualized story not of broken feet but of feet washing.
Every one of the spiritual metaphors that inform Dovey’s life are contained in her childhood: the baptismal metaphor of the bathing, the purification metaphor of the lye soap, the foot-washing ritual with its resonance to Holy Thursday, the story of the sunrise with its Resurrection overtones. The profound religious faith that defines Dovey was given to her in her childhood,
and these stories capture that which is most essential about her. If you don’t understand Dovey’s faith in God, you don’t understand Dovey.
3. I believe I’ve heard you say this is a book every American should read. Why?
Contemporary America urgently needs this book. As we contemplate at fifty years’ distance the meaning of Brown v. Board in the light of recent Supreme Court rulings, as we struggle with issues of race at every turn, there is a sense that we’ve lost our bearings. What is justice? What sort of a society are we aiming toward? How can we capture the values we seem to have lost? How do we arrest what Dovey calls “the demon of violence” that is destroying our cities? To be able to tap into the world view of a 96-year-old living legend who brought her fight into the streets, the jailhouses, the churches, and ultimately, into the hearts of the individuals to whom she ministered, is an extraordinary opportunity, I believe, for people of all races. Like all truly great stories, Dovey’s teaches us essential truths without seeming to. Indeed, this book is designedly non-political. And although Dovey is a minister, her book is not overtly religious. It simply tells a story – a story of one human being’s quest for a kind of justice far beyond the law, with all the attendant wisdom such a quest implies.
4. What, if anything, have you learned in the 15 years you spent with Dovey that has impacted your life? How and why?
I’ve been profoundly changed by having known Dovey for the past 15 years, and so has my family – my late mother, Kathleen Burns, my husband Jack, my son Luke, all of whom came to know and love Dovey and learn from her.
From Dovey, I learned what real faith is, and not only from listening to her talk about her life. I personally saw her confront pain and loss, and I was personally present, sitting with her, as she stood right at the precipice of despair when she preached at the funeral of a 14-year-old boy in her church family who was shot to death. We sat together in my car in the church parking lot before the funeral, and she shocked me by telling me that she had no idea, none at all, what she was going to say. “Always, there must be something to fasten on to as we march out of death,” she said, “but this time, I cannot find the rung of hope.” As I say in the book’s Preface, where I tell the story of this funeral, this was the first time I’d ever heard anything like despair in Dovey’s voice. But then I saw her climb out of her despondency as she rose to address the assembly, as she dipped deep into her well of faith to find the words to comfort them and move them out of their rage and their despair and their sense of hopelessness about their community. Apart from the profound lesson of faith I learned personally that day, the funeral also happened to be the turning point for me as the writer, because on that day I knew that the book, which I’d initially envisioned as a standard third-person biography, had to be written in Dovey’s own voice. It’s a story of faith, and I understood that day that only by hearing Dovey’s voice, as best I could channel it, that readers would understand her essence.
I also saw Dovey confront personal pain – her blindness, her physical weakness, her sister Rachel’s breast cancer diagnosis – and I saw her, time after time, wrestle with that pain as a human being, and then rise up as a woman of faith and walk forward. I was deeply affected by these experiences. I learned that faith is tough, that God is demanding, and that he expects us to behave. Dovey confronted, in my presence, some enormous challenges to her faith. And one by one, she rose above them, not as some glass-enclosed saint, but as a real human being, filled with
fear, just as I often am. But her faith in God saw her through every time. For me, she stands alongside my own mother as the virtuous woman of the Book of Proverbs, the woman “whose price is beyond rubies.”
5. What is the one thing you feel folks should take away after reading this book?
I hope that our readers will find courage in this book that will see them through their own difficulties and inspire them to do more than they would otherwise. I am talking about a very particular kind of courage – the kind that is grounded in faith and in love.
6. How do you think Dovey would answer that question?
Actually, I think she’d answer in pretty much the same way I have – except that I’m not sure she’s as impressed with her own courage as I am. I think Dovey wants our readers to come away with a renewed belief in the eternal things that she soaked up in childhood and then carried with her throughout her life. She feels that these eternal things will sustain every human being if they attend to them. The book, for her, is a love song to those values – as it is for me – and she would want people to be lifted up by that love song.
7. I know one of your Washingtonian articles was made into an HBO movie. And I know there has already been a play about Dovey’s life performed at Spelman. Are there any signs yet that this book is headed for the big or little screen?
Yes, I’m very proud of the job that HBO did in adapting my Washingtonian magazine article on Vivien Thomas in Something the Lord Made. I can’t speak about film interest in Dovey’s story without divulging confidential information. I can only say that Justice Older than the Law has been put into the hands of a number of people who appreciate its potential as a film and who are in a position to make it happen. I learned with the Vivien Thomas story (which took 15 years to become a movie) that these things unfold in their own time. What is most important is that the right group of people – scriptwriters, actors, producers – come together in precisely the right way.
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