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Welcome to the Moth Podcast. I'm Sarah Haberman, the Moth's Executive Director. A few weeks ago, before the ruling on Roe v. Wade, we had a special episode about body autonomy. It highlighted the importance of choice and having ownership over your decisions, your heart, your mind, and your body.
With the news of the reversal, we felt the need to produce another special episode. This one is dedicated to everyone who is reeling from the devastating effect of the court's decision, in particular the women of color in this country who will be impacted most. If you're like me, you spent the last few days struggling to find a way forward. This episode is for all of you who need a shot of inspiration to help you regain your strength, find your voice, and restore your hope.
We have two stories for you today. As you listen to them, remember the power of your own narrative and that telling stories, sharing truths, and making people listen is all a part of creating positive change. Our first story is from Sheila Calloway. She told this in 2017 on a stage in Nashville. Here's Sheila live at the mall. So there I was, standing at the podium.
with my client. I was the public defender and I was representing him when he had been charged with burglary. They claimed he had broken into a store and taken some money out of the register. Now the video they had wasn't really clear. But he used to work at that store. So there was a good reason that his fingerprints were on the scene. And so I really thought I had a winnable case.
I could probably come out good on this one, but I was practicing in front of Judge Johns at the time. And Judge Johns had this long list of rules that you had to follow in her courtroom. And if you didn't follow, if you missed one rule, that could be the difference between freedom and jail.
And so I had sat with my client, Mr. Coleman, and we had gone over these rules. I mean, I literally gave him a copy of the rules, and I read them out to him. You must use the title of anybody you're referring to, Mr. Jones, Ms. Smith. You must wear professional clothes. You must have a job each time you come to court, and you must always
always answer questions, yes ma'am or yes your honor. These were the rules you had to follow. So when I first saw Mr. Coleman come into court that day and he had on a polo shirt and khaki pants, oh I got a little nervous but I said we're gonna be all right. Not what I told him but not too shabby. But then when the judge asked him where he was working, he said, well I don't have a job. I felt a
The ground opened up just a little. And then she went on to ask him, "Well, why don't you have a job?" And then he said, "Well, Sheila," referring to me, "told me I should get a job, but I thought I should just wait until the case was done." There it was, the ground completely... And sure enough, he was carted off to jail. He was revoked on his bond because he didn't follow those arbitrary rules.
And that was what they called justice. He ended up spending about six months in jail, ended up pleading guilty to get out for two years on probation. I started feeling really bad about what the justice system was. Was this really justice? I mean, it seemed like if you didn't follow the rules, arbitrary rules, then you could lose your freedom. And that just doesn't seem like justice. And so I got a little disappointed in our justice system.
But then my supervisor, my boss, came to me one day and said, "We're going to switch you. We're going to put you in Judge Thomas Shriver's courtroom." Heard about Judge Shriver, and, you know, he seemed pretty fair. But when I went into the courtroom, it just felt different. There was never this long list of rules that you had to follow. There was absolutely no dress code. It felt calm and relaxing. People felt okay in that courtroom.
And I started to think, well, maybe, maybe there might be some justice in this courtroom. So I had a client, Mr. Blacksmith, and he wasn't charged with very much. He was an older gentleman, and it was minor charges, and he had never been to court, and he just was nervous about being in that courtroom. And when he showed up, felt like a distillery. I mean, I thought he had bathed in a bath full of beer. It was
and I didn't know what to do. I was hiding him. I felt dread. I just didn't know how to handle it. I was giving him every mint I could find. I was spraying him with perfume, whatever I could do because he was going to jail because he smelled like a distillery. So finally they called him into the courtroom and immediately the prosecutor stood up and said, Your Honor, I want his bond revoked. He's been drinking. Judge Stryver looked at us
He must have sensed that fear and that dread. And he said to me, I asked my client if he had been drinking. And my client was very honest with him. He said, yeah, yeah, I've been drinking a little. And he said, well, what you been drinking? And he said, well, I had a beer. Well, how much beer did you have? Well, I only had one beer, but it was a 40 ounce.
I knew it. The floor started opening up. We were done. We were done. But then I heard Judge Shriver snickering. Actually, he was really laughing. The judge was actually laughing. And he said to Mr. Blacksmith, "Now, Mr. Blacksmith, next time you come, don't drink before you get here. You can go." Now, Judge Shriver wasn't being lenient on him.
He was being fair. He recognized that this gentleman made a mistake, and he recognized that he deserved a second chance. And we were able to resolve his case. Mr. Blacksmith was able to do good, get back on the right track, and never come back again. And that was justice.
And so I started getting that hope back of justice and started now learning so much from Judge Shriver. I had the opportunity to work in his courtroom for over three years and just learning. And not only was he a good mentor, he was like a father figure to me. He was someone that always treated everybody with respect and with fairness while holding them accountable for the actions that they did. True justice.
One Saturday morning, I was at home sitting there watching TV and my supervisor calls me and she says, "Are you sitting down?" And I was like, "Well, I can sit down. What's going on?" And then she told me that the night before, Judge Shriver had died in his office. At first, I was dumb. I just didn't know what she was saying. It didn't make sense to me. And she made sure I was still on the phone and she repeated what she had said. And it just broke my heart. I heard what she said.
And Judge Shriver's death was like me losing a piece of me. It was one of the hardest things I had to deal with. His courtroom was closed for several weeks. But then when they opened it back up, they had to get an interim judge until they could find someone to take his place permanently. And wouldn't you know it, that interim judge just happened to be the retired Judge Johns. Oh, not again. So we were going...
back to that system of arbitrary rules and just unfairness, which was not justice. And as I kept practicing there and the struggle kept going, I just kept getting frustrated with the system.
And one time I had a young kid, he was about 19 years old at the time, and he had made a pretty serious mistake. He was at the ATM machine, he found a card, he was like, ooh, and he took the card with him and he started using it. He went and bought some gas, he bought some pizza, he went and got a DVD player, he was starting on some other stuff and got some little stuff to go with it, and then all of a sudden it clicked to him, ooh, this is not right.
I shouldn't be doing this. And so he backtracked. He actually backtracked, went back to the stores where he had been selling stuff, turned everything that he turned in, except for, of course, the pizza and the gas. He couldn't turn those in anymore. But he recognized the wrong that he did, and he was trying to make it right.
And so in that type of case, I was asking the district attorney in the courtroom if he would consider giving him what we call expungable probation. It's like if you do everything you're supposed to do, you admit you're guilty, you know you're wrong, you do the conditions that you're supposed to do, and by the end, this is a felony charge. This felony charge gets erased from your record.
And in this case, it was so important for this felony charge to be erased from this kid's record. Because if he had a felony, he couldn't get a good job. If he had a felony, he couldn't go to college. If he had a felony, he couldn't get good housing. And these were all things that he wanted to do. He admitted it. He knew that he made a mistake. And all he wanted was a second chance.
And so if a DA doesn't agree to expungable probation, every once in a while you get an opportunity to ask the judge if they would consider overruling the DA's decision. And if Judge Shriver had been here in this case, there was absolutely no doubt he would have overruled it. He would have said, oh yeah, this is a kid that's made a mistake, recognizes the mistake that he's made, and he's ready to make it right. He can have expungable probation. But Judge Shriver was dead, and I had a different judge.
And I knew in my heart of hearts that this judge would never, would never give this kid expungable probation. And the frustration just grew in me. And the more I talked to the DA about it, the more smug he seemed to be and just would answer me, well, he did the crime. He's got to do the time. And kept saying that over and over and over to me. And it just built inside of me. The anger was so strong.
deep that all of a sudden I snapped and I immediately put down my files and I pointed my finger in his face. You don't know what justice is. You are blah, blah, blah, blah, bleep, bleep, blah, blah, blah, blah, bleep, bleep, bleep, bleep, bleep, bleep, bleep, bleep, blah, blah. Now mind you, this was a club people. There were attorneys, my supervisor, my poor clients.
watching this but at that moment I didn't care who was watching all I cared about was if judge Shriver had have been here this would have been fair this is not right this is not fair
And so my supervisor came quickly over to try and calm me down. She got in front of me so that I couldn't see what was going on behind me. And she said, you got to calm down. You got to calm down. You can't act like this in court. You got to calm down. And so me and my ultimate upsetness, having my out-of-body experience, I kind of looked around to her side, and I saw the DAs talking together about what I had just said.
And I saw that they were trying to be a little smug about it, and it looked like they were trying to make fun of what I had just done. And so I said, "I'm sorry, I need to go handle some more business." And so I proceeded to go around, started telling them, "If you got any questions, I just told him. I'll tell you the same thing." Blee, blee, blee, blee, blee, blee, blee, blee, blee, blee, blee. And boy, did I feel good. Now, my client didn't get the expungable probation.
And at that moment, I knew that it was time for me to do something different. I could not, could not practice law in a place that I didn't feel was fair or just. In a place that was just controlled by someone's random arbitrary rules. I had to do something different.
And so I struggled a little in that court for a little while longer, about two months, and then all of a sudden, one of the attorneys, one of the public defenders that worked in the juvenile division was leaving, and they needed someone to take his place. And so I quickly volunteered. And the first day I went to juvenile court, it felt like Judge Shriver's home all over again. It felt like people really trying to work with our youth
in trying to make a difference in their lives. It felt like people who knew that our youth were going to make mistakes, and they just needed a second chance. And I felt like we had some justice all over again. And so, 20 years later, almost 20 years later, I stand before you as the juvenile court judge. And every day, and every day,
Every day as that juvenile court judge, I think about that lesson that I had learned from Judge Shriver. That people make mistakes. That people are unique. That people are going to make some errors. But it's up to us to build them up and to give them a second chance. I had an opportunity one time, one of the attorneys that used to practice in front of Judge Shriver had a case in front of me.
And after she finished her case, she came to me and she said, practicing in front of you made me feel like practicing in front of my favorite judge all over again. It was the biggest compliment I've ever had and something that I will always, always try to live up to. Thank you. That was Sheila Calloway. Sheila Calloway is a former public defender and current juvenile court judge.
She also serves as an adjunct professor at Vanderbilt University Law School and Belmont Law School. In addition, she's a wife, a proud mother, a member of the Temple Church, and a regular volunteer at the Second Harvest Food Bank. Our next storyteller is Suzanne Schmidt. She told this in 2018 on a stage in Miami. Here's Suzanne, live at the Moth. So the first sentence I ever learned in Italian was, "Si prega di portare libertà," which means, "Please bring to me liberty."
or in my great-grandmother's case, bail money. My great-grandmother was an Italian immigrant who came to this country and became a garment worker in New York City, and she had been arrested so many times fighting with the suffragettes for the women's right to vote that this was the sentence that her daughter most remembered about her. And so... I'm just going to lower this. Sorry, I touched the mic. I touched it. LAUGHTER
And so my great-grandmother died the year that I was born, so I don't remember much about her at all, with the exception of the stories that my family would tell. And this one picture that sat on my grandparents' wall, which was a picture of her wading in the waters off of Coney Island in this long black dress pulled up between her legs and tied off at the waist because she couldn't afford a bathing suit.
And so the thing about Italian New York families is you might think that men are in charge, but really in my family, the people that were in charge were the people that could win the most arguments. And if arguing were an Olympic sport, the women in my family would be gold medalists. Because while the men outnumbered the women three to one, the men in my family, when they would argue, is they would use this thing called facts.
And they argued like it was an individual sprint. And the women would know that arguing is really a long-distance relay. There are arguments that started in small fishing villages in Sicily that are happening right now in Brooklyn.
And so in the summer of 1972, this amazing thing happened. And on television one day was Karen Carpenter playing the drums. And I had to pick an instrument. And I knew I wanted to be a drummer. So I knew in order to do this, I'd have to convince the women in my family that this was a good thing to do. And so one Sunday afternoon at dinner, I said, I want to be a drummer. And instantly, my grandfather said, women don't play the drums. And
And my aunt turned around and she said, "Yeah, women can play the drums. She can play whatever she wants." And my father then said, "Well, there are no women drummers." And my grandmother looked at him and said, "Karen Carpenter plays the drums." And I thought, "The gold medals go into the women." And then my grandfather said, "Well, I don't think she's a very good role model." And my grandmother looked at him and said, "You're not a very good role model either."
And yet you are still here. And my grandfather said, well, she wears pants on stage. And my grandmother said, you wear pants, and again, you are still here. And the gold medal goes to the women. And so that fall, I joined a drum line, me and nine boys. Now, the other thing that was happening in 1972 was that Title IX had just been passed. So women were showing up everywhere, and boys were pissed.
And so I showed up every day with my drumsticks and I practiced really hard. And in spite of everything that they did, they stole my sheet music, they would take my drumsticks, I persevered. And so when this came for the winter concert, the bandmaster picked me to play the drum set.
And this was an incredible honor, and I knew every single stroke of that music. And my parents were so proud that my mother bought me this long, green, velvet, flowing gown.
And so this thing was incredible and I get on stage and I'm playing along and I look over and all the boys are kind of snickering at me and laughing at me and I'm like not just paying attention at all and then I realized somewhere between the Hanukkah medley and Frosty the Snowman that a long velvet gown is not the best thing to play for the drum set.
And so I look out into the audience and I'm panicked and Rabin Kluglein looks over at me and he's like, "I'll take your drum set solo." I was like, "Hell you will, I'm doing this." And I'm not quite sure how I'm gonna get into the position for the drum set in this long gown and I look out at my family and there's like three rows of them. My grandmother is so proud, she's crying. And I know in that moment what I need to do.
And I stride up to the corner of that stage and I reach down and I pull that dress up between my legs and I tie that freaking thing off at the waist and I sit down at the drum set and I freaking rock that thing. I come off stage, my family's in the lobby and my grandmother comes up to me and she hugs me and she says, "Your great-grandmother is here with you tonight."
And she's so proud. I fell asleep that night with the cymbals kind of ringing in my ears and that feeling of your heart pounding in your chest when you've worked really hard for something and you've been able to achieve. And I realized...
I don't think my great-grandmother meant bail money at all. I think she meant liberty. I think she meant the right for women to vote. I think she meant the right for us to show our legs at Coney Island on a hot summer day without being harassed. And I think she meant the hope that comes that if you work really hard for something, even if you don't get to achieve it, that one day maybe your daughter or your granddaughter or your great-granddaughter will get to...
Be up on stage and they will just get to rock that freaking thing. That was Suzanne Schmidt. In addition to being the great-granddaughter of a suffragette, Suzanne is the drummer for the band The Brevity Thing, a professor of clinical mental health counseling at Northern Vermont University, a regional producer for The Moth, and the mother of two amazing sons.
We hope these stories have given you some inspiration. To everyone listening, wherever you are, remember that building a better world, one where everyone is valued and has equal voice, is hard work. We hope that after listening to these stories, you'll be inspired to volunteer, to donate, to take one of a million small actions that together can make real change. Because together, we can chart a path forward.
Sarah Haberman is The Moth's longtime executive director. A native of Wisconsin, she's a proud New Yorker, feminist, and stepmother of two extraordinary grown-up children. This episode of the podcast was produced by The Moth.
The Moth's leadership team includes Catherine Burns, Sarah Haberman, Jennifer Hickson, Meg Bowles, Kate Tellers, Jennifer Birmingham, Marina Cloutier, Suzanne Rust, Brandon Grant, Inga Kludowski, Aldi Kaza, Sarah Austin-Janess, and Sarah Jane Johnson. All Moth stories are true, as remembered by storytellers. For more about our podcast, information on pitching your own story, and everything else, go to our website, themoth.org.
The Moss Podcast is presented by PRX, the public radio exchange, helping make public radio more public at PRX.org.