In ‘Lovely One,’ Ketanji Brown Jackson Credits The Mentors Who Lifted Her Up
Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson at NBC Studios to discuss her memoirs "Lovely One" on September 3, 2024, Image: Nathan Congleton/NBC
Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson handed down many important decisions on her way to becoming the first Black woman appointed to the nation’s highest court in 2022. But perhaps the most astute was rejecting a career in the magazine industry before anyone could see it was dying.
In a packed but fast-moving new memoir, “Lovely One,” Jackson tells how 30 years before, during a brief stint as a reporter-researcher at Time, she suggested that a top editor might want to send someone to cover Hurricane Andrew. “Oh, we don’t do weather stories,” he replied dismissively of the storm that would cause $27 billion in damage, including ripping the roofs off most homes on her parents’ street in Miami.
“Win or lose a case, the law was logical and understandable,” she writes, “whereas in journalism the criteria for one story being chosen over another seemed subjective and often somewhat arbitrary.”
Subjective? Supreme Court cases? Never.
Jackson also considered becoming a Broadway actress, teaching herself to sing for a college revue about Billie Holiday, and her book could probably be optioned for a bio-musical itself. (Imagine the big “Immunity” number!) “Lovely One” is about motivation and mentors, swooshing through a résumé without apparent flaw. It’s a great glass elevator of uplift.
The title is the translation of Jackson’s given name, Ketanji Onyika, a phrase from an untraced African dialect suggested by her Aunt Carolynn, a missionary. Ketanji was born in Washington, D.C., on Sept. 14, the same date as Constance Baker Motley, the first Black female federal judge, who became her “personal heroine and forever role model.”
Her father, Johnny, was a school-board attorney; her mother, Ellery, became a principal after teaching science, and little Ketanji was “an enthusiastic pupil, a Mama-pleasing little sponge,” whose foundational texts included “Danny Dunn and the Homework Machine” and the blessedly inclusive “Schoolhouse Rock!” Her younger brother, Ketajh, was more of a risk taker; he became a drug-enforcement detective in the Baltimore unit that inspired “The Wire” and served in Operation Enduring Freedom before settling down to nice relaxing work in commercial litigation.
The family’s ancestors were enslaved on plantations across the South, and the arc from there to here is majestic. Jackson describes vividly her maternal grandfather, Horace, who got fed up with chauffeuring white customers in the Jim Crow era and started a landscaping business in Florida, and her grandmother Euzera, a housekeeper turned nurse’s aide. They moved from a community on the edge of Miami known as “Colored Town” to raise their five children in a public works project called Liberty Square, which at Christmas rang out with the sound of roller skates on asphalt.
Euzera and Ellery consistently told Ketanji that she was destined for greatness and above engaging with the prejudice that lingered after desegregation, painful and plentiful as it was. At 7 or 8, the mother of a white playmate broke up the friendship after finding her “too different.” While at Palmetto High, she was a debate star (and a few years behind Jeff Bezos) — yet followed with suspicion by a salesperson when shopping for poster materials to advertise a bake sale. At Harvard, someone hung a Confederate flag in a dorm window; Jackson took part in the subsequent protests, but also cited Toni Morrison warning against racism as a distraction. When working as an associate in corporate law — this after clerking for Justice Stephen Breyer — she was more than once mistaken for a secretary.
Since her swearing-in, Jackson has been commended for her assertiveness as a junior member of the liberal minority; in the words of one law professor, she “came to play.” But you’ll glean more about the dynamic with her fellow judges by reading Supreme Court opinions than from this book, from which Samuel A. Alito Jr. and Clarence Thomas are entirely absent and the rest of the gang mentioned only briefly.
“Lovely One” is formally written, but quite personal. The judge unwinds her fairy-tale love story with Patrick Jackson, a Boston Brahmin surgeon she met as an undergraduate, and their challenges raising two daughters, one with autism spectrum disorder, while working long hours. There are the indignities of breastfeeding and pumping, and naps stolen in a Safeway parking lot. She explains how the trademarked Sisterlocks method has made her hair routine easier, and the statement necklaces that accent her robes, like Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s collars. Readers disappointed by Breyer’s own recent, dry entry into the booming Supreme bookstakes, “Reading the Constitution,” will be gratified to see him pop up here in bicycle shorts, recommending French restaurants.
At a moment when the court is under intense scrutiny, Jackson goes heavier on work-life balance, lighter on the scales of justice — with some notable exceptions. One is the case of her Uncle Thomas, “a nonviolent bit player in a small-time drug scheme,” sentenced to life without parole — more than many murderers — when he was caught with 14 kilos of powder cocaine in his car after a few minor offenses. A friend took his case pro bono, and President Obama granted him clemency, but he died soon after being released from 28 years of imprisonment.
“There, but for the grace of God, go I,” Jackson has thought many times about him and other defendants; a phrase that seems to underline her thinking as much as the “progressive originalism” for which she’s been both lauded and attacked.
A footnote: If there’s any vestige of Jackson’s time at Time in this book, it’s a generous sprinkling of the magazine’s tradition of inverted syntax, famously parodied by the humorist Wolcott Gibbs (“Backward ran sentences until reeled the mind”). Or maybe lines like “Never again would I allow fear to shut me down when faced with the deep end of any circumstance” were the contribution of Jackson’s collaborator, Rosemarie Robotham. Either way, they add unnecessary starch to an otherwise billowingly triumphant American tale of early promise fulfilled.
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