EXCLUSIVE: Read An Excerpt From Associate Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson’s Memoir, ‘Lovely One’ – Essence

In this excerpt from ‘Lovely One,’ Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson shares a deeply personal reflection on the challenges that have shaped her journey. Through her words, we see not only the making of a trailblazer but also the quiet moments of resilience that define her story. ‘Lovely One’ is available for purchase now.

No one saw when I slipped under the water. I flailed and sputtered and cried out, but the thumping bass of Motown blaring from two giant speakers set up on the patio drowned out the sound. Just before the clear swell of water closed over my head, I glimpsed my mother and her fellow science teachers sitting in lounge chairs, chatting and laughing. My dad and some of the other fathers were over by the barbecue grill, turning hot dogs and cooking hamburgers as children noisily played catch on the lawn or executed splashy cannonballs into the shallow end of the pool.

Seven years old that summer, I would be entering third grade at Sunset Elementary in the fall. My father, having passed the Florida bar, had recently begun working as an attorney for the Miami-headquartered Burger King Corporation, while my mother remained on staff at Rockway Junior High. We still resided in our apartment on the University of Miami campus, as the law school’s administration allowed married students who requested it to continue living in family housing for a year or two after graduation. To bridge the hot August days until the fall term started, my parents had sent me to camp at the Museum of Science, where my mother was one of the teachers. They had also enrolled me in piano lessons with Victor Kelly, an instructor who came highly recommended, and swimming classes at the Venetian Pool, a beautiful aquatic center carved out of a coral rock quarry about ten minutes away from our home.

My mother had been adamant that I learn how to swim properly. Swimming was a skill in which she herself wasn’t very confident, despite being born and raised close to the ocean, on a landmass almost completely surrounded by water. I knew that when my mother was coming up, all but one of the local beaches had been off-limits to Black people. My grandfather Horace had sometimes taken the family on outings to the Colored beach on Virginia Key. The area had been opened to African Americans in 1945, after a successful protest led by Lawson Thomas, a local lawyer and activist who would become the city’s first Black judge when he was appointed to the newly built Negro Municipal Court five years later. The sole stretch of shoreline available to Black Miami residents had quickly become a favorite gathering place for their families. In the rough ocean off Virginia Key Beach, Granddad had given all five of his children swimming lessons. Perhaps they would have had an easier time learning to swim in the calmer waters of a municipal pool, but that had not been an option during my mother’s childhood, as public pools were designated as for “Whites Only.”

Even after municipal recreation centers were fully desegregated in the 1960s, rather than welcome Black swimmers to those facilities, officials in many cities opted to drain the pools and fill them with concrete. Those recreation centers that stayed open saw precipitous declines in patronage as many White parents stopped bringing their families, and those who could afford it constructed backyard pools to ensure that their kids would never have to share the water with Black children. Some towns quietly defunded their aquatic facilities, closing them down as they fell into disrepair. Elsewhere, municipal pools were sold to private owners who agreed to operate them as membership-only clubs, putting them beyond the reach of federal law and making them once again off-limits to African Americans. These acts still reverberate today—studies show that almost two-thirds of Black children are unable to swim, compared to 40 percent of their White peers, and African American children are almost six times more likely than White children to die by drowning in a pool.

My mother may not have closely tracked the shuttering of aquatic centers across the country in the aftermath of desegregation, but a decade later, with every remaining public pool and stretch of beach in Florida open to her only daughter, she had decided that I would be the proficient swimmer that previous generations of Black children had never had the opportunity to become. And I was well on my way. I had grown to love slicing through the crystal-clear water at the Venetian Pool, relishing my growing skill. But my very favorite thing to do in the water wasn’t swimming. I loved to float on my back, my limbs loose and weightless, cold water lapping against my body, my face warmed by the South Florida sun.

And so, at a pool party held on a summer Saturday by one of my mother’s teacher friends, I had been eyeing the deep end for a while. At last, I screwed up my resolve and slid soundlessly into the water, flipped onto my back, and squinted into the sun, turning my head now and then to make sure that I was within arm’s reach of the pool’s edge. The water slapped around my ears, muting the revelry on the lawn. I began to feel deeply peaceful and closed my eyes as I drifted. When next I opened my eyes to assess my closeness to the pool wall, I was startled to see that I had floated out to the center of the deep end. I panicked. My limbs suddenly became lead, and chlorinated water rushed into my throat and nostrils as I sank to the bottom of the pool.

Some instinct prompted my mother to look around at just that moment. When she couldn’t find me among the children racing up and down the lawn, she leapt to her feet and ran over to the pool. She screamed when she saw me languishing like a starfish in the blue depths. But before she could jump in herself, another teacher rushed past her and dove into the water fully clothed. Robert Losyk, whom everyone called Bob, retrieved me in seconds, lifting me coughing and gasping to the pool’s edge, where my father, alerted by my mother’s scream, pulled me out of the water. I hadn’t been under very long, and now as my father slapped my back to help me cough up the water I had swallowed, my overwhelming feeling was not one of relief at being

rescued but of miserable disappointment in myself. Why had I panicked? I could swim, after all, so why had I lost confidence?

It wasn’t like me to doubt myself in that way, especially given all of the affirmations I had received from both of my parents. They knew that I was one of the few Black children in my gifted classes at school, and that some people might make assumptions about my abilities, based on subtle yet pervasive messaging in the wider society suggesting that Black people were of inferior intellect and culture. Rather than allow such stereotypes to undercut my budding self-conception, my parents sought to put me into circumstances in which I was required to speak up and demonstrate my intelligence, not just to other people but also—and more importantly—to myself. They intentionally shored up the capacities they had identified in me and made it clear that I also had to be willing to stretch myself, to work as diligently as I knew how. I vividly recall that whenever I complained that I was having a hard time—say, with math homework or a piano piece I was trying to learn—my mother would look at me calmly.

“Can this be done, Ketanji?” she would ask. “Have you seen other people do it?”

“Yes,” I would respond, knowing exactly what she would say next.

“Well, if it is possible for a person to do this thing, then you can do it, too.”

Both my parents were determined that I not discount my own abilities, and they absolutely would not abide me throwing up my hands as if I were helpless. I distinctly remember thinking that other parents seemed so much more cuddly than mine. In school I would see other kids crying and whimpering, “I don’t want to do this” or “I’m afraid,” and their parents would swoop them up and comfort them. “It’s okay,” the parents might assure them. “You don’t have to do it if you don’t want to.” Not my mother. She was more apt to say, in a reasonable tone, “No, you go out there and do it, Ketanji. Don’t give in to the doubts.”

Not long after the swimming pool incident—perhaps as a result of it—my mother encouraged me to participate in the public speaking portion of the Miami-Dade County Youth Fair & Exposition. And when I say “encouraged,” what I really mean is she informed me that she had already entered me in that category. Every year, students from schools across the city would submit essays, poetry, paintings, sculptures, photography, and science projects, and deliver dramatic readings, and a panel of judges would assess their work and award coveted prizes and ribbons.

For my entry, my mother had chosen Margaret Walker’s poem “For My People,” a poignant rumination on the tragedies and triumphs of Black people’s American odyssey. In 1941, the poem had earned Walker the prestigious Yale Younger Poets Prize, making her the first African American to be thus honored. Twenty-five years later, the Birmingham, Alabama–born writer’s critically acclaimed work Jubilee, based on the life of her great-grandmother, would be judged by a Washington Post reviewer to be “the first truly historical Black American novel.” Jubilee was also visionary in that it was one of the first works of literature to call for the liberation and sovereignty of Black women.

Long after I was grown, I asked my mother, why that poem? Had she selected it for me to learn because of Margaret Walker’s inspiring legacy of firsts? My mother’s response was unexpected. “I knew who Margaret Walker was, of course, and I knew about all of her accolades, but her biography wasn’t the reason I chose that piece,” she told me. “It was the poem itself. I had read it for the first time in college, and I had always loved what it had to say. My only reservations in choosing it for you were the length of the work and the fact that I was trying to teach it to a kid who had really not experienced the kind of tribulation Margaret Walker was talking about. But I knew you had a voice. I knew you could learn it. And what I was really hoping was that in the future, having mastered this poem, you would be able to circle back to it when you encountered your own trials and draw strength from its meaning.”

Realizing my mother’s desire to gift me with the enduring values of Margaret Walker’s ballad on the resilience, love, and unquenchable spirit of my people, I was deeply moved by the memory of how, for weeks before the youth fair, my mother had worked with me in the evenings to help me memorize the lines. Some might have thought the language and ideas expressed by Walker beyond the grasp of a third grader, but as my mother coached me on tone, inflection, and the rise and fall of my delivery, she made sure I understood every word. Nor did I resist our nightly sessions of dissecting the profound truths contained in each stanza. In fact, I recall feeling excited by the prospect of showing people what I had learned and could do.

On the day of my performance, I stood in my Sunday best with my feet planted on that stage, a thin brown girl with a voice almost too robust for her person. I could tell that people were surprised by my delivery, that as I warmed up to the recitation, giving each word its due weight and purpose, I was defying their expectations of me. Ever since appearing in elementary school plays with my best friend, Sunny, I had known that I enjoyed being onstage, but this was a larger audience than any I’d ever stood before, and I could feel the invigorating exchange of energy as people listened attentively to my presentation. That could have been the moment when I caught the bug, when I truly began to appreciate the possibilities of oration. More than anything that day, I wanted to communicate the pride in my people that Margaret Walker’s words so powerfully evoked. I wanted to do her artistic creation justice.

“Let a new earth rise,” I proclaimed, spreading my arms wide and giving my all to her final stanza. “Let another world be born. Let a bloody peace be written in the sky. Let a second generation full of courage issue forth; let a people loving freedom come to growth . . .”

Not only did I win my public speaking event that year, but I was also awarded a purple rosette, a recognition above and beyond first place. My joy was multiplied when I learned that Sunny, too, had won a purple rosette, for her entry of a dramatic performance.

The following year, I would enter and win another purple rosette, this time for my recitation of an excerpt from The Pied Piper of Hamelin. That evening, recalling how determined I had been to excel in my orations for the youth fair, I suddenly found myself thinking back to the day when I had almost drowned. Belatedly, I grasped the lesson in those alarming moments at the bottom of the pool, when fear had overtaken my senses, and the failure to trust what I had worked so hard to achieve could have cost me my life. That night, I made a promise to myself: Never again would I allow fear to shut me down when faced with the deep end of any circumstance. In the future, even if afraid, I would swim.