A Woman Apart

In western Virginia, tucked in a clearing amid dense woods, are the decaying ruins of a house where nightmares were made. The place was never much to begin with, more of a shanty than anything else. It lacked running water, and only the kitchen and living room had electricity. No one has lived there for years, though for more than a decade of her childhood, Carol Swain and her 11 brothers and sisters called it home. The structure still stands, though there’s nothing much left but a battered tin roof and the stark silhouette of rotting beams in Virginia dirt. A bare, hollow structure, it is now the front entrance to memories best forgotten.

But Swain and her two sisters do remember.

They remember how their mother, Dorothy Henderson, known to all as “Mama Dot,” married a violent drunk who moved them, along with his nine children, into that two-bedroom hovel deep in the woods. They remember savage beatings, backbreaking chores and sleeping on the kitchen floor. They remember their mother’s disability, how she spent a lifetime crippled with infantile paralysis suffered during early childhood. One side of Mama Dot’s body was smaller than the other, and she limped. This did not spare her from her husband’s savagery.

“He used to beat her up,” recalls Swain’s sister, Maxine Miller. “I used to fight for her, and then I would get beat up.”

Meanwhile, her sister Carol, who decades hence would become one of the most successful and controversial figures in modern academia, sat in the corner and wept. When the beatings started, she quietly withdrew into her own mind, like a rabbit seeking its burrow when the hard rain comes.

Swain would “get back in the corner, in her own world,” Miller says. “Even then I knew that she was thinking of a better place to live. Of getting away.”

Eventually, she would escape and reach heights unimaginable to the girl who sobbed as her mother got whipped. But things would get much worse for Swain before they got better. She dropped out of the ninth grade, married at 16 and had three children by the time she was 20. Her youngest child, a daughter, would die in her crib, and Swain became tortured by depression. Then her marriage ended.

But the nighttime of her life would slowly give way to a breaking dawn that even now is not fully realized. She got a GED, enrolled in community college, and in a matter of years graduated from Roanoke College in Virginia.

Now 54, she teaches at Vanderbilt University Law School, collects academic awards like children do Halloween candy and is a regular on cable news programs.

She has become a talking head. See her on CNN—where she’s a paid contributor—exchanging populist banter with Lou Dobbs or dispensing legal opinions to Anderson Cooper. Hear her on National Public Radio, tearing into politically correct preconceptions and the unfortunate guests who hold them. Read her op-eds in The Tennessean, The Washington Post, The Washington Times or The Chronicle of Higher Education.

“She is one of our most liked personalities,” Dobbs tells the Scene. The audience “really respects what she has to say, and they like her on the air.”

Her hyper-opinionated books cover topics ranging from immigration to white nationalism to the effectiveness of black representation in Congress. Her ideas are strident, uncompromising, counterintuitive.

Last December, when a British schoolteacher was jailed in Sudan for naming a class teddy bear Mohammed, the Western media raged at the seemingly incomprehensible intolerance of that nation. Swain, not so much. While she called the Sudanese goverment’s actions “astonishing,” in a Tennessean editorial she asked, “Would a conservative Christian like me be offended if a Muslim schoolteacher in the U.S. allowed or encouraged her first-grade students to name a stuffed animal Jesus Christ?”

“Yes, I think I would be offended…. I might view the naming situation as further evidence of the disrespect that secular humanists often display toward Christian believers.”

Opinions like these cut to the quick of the culture wars and often stand at odds with academic orthodoxy. This may explain Swain’s uneasy relationship with peers at Vanderbilt, but it has made her a media commodity. It also got her noticed by President Bush.

This year, Bush nominated Swain to the National Endowment for the Humanities advisory council. As a member, Swain will help decide how the endowment’s massive $144 million-plus budget is disseminated among American thinkers, educators and artists.

In 2007, she was appointed to the Tennessee Advisory Committee of the U.S. Civil Rights Commission. The state advisory committees act as the local eyes and ears of the federal commission, which examines possible civil rights violations ranging from voter disenfranchisement to employment discrimination.

She has professional plaudits to go with these appointments. Swain was a tenured professor at Princeton by the age of 40. She has written five books—three published by Cambridge, one by Harvard, which received a major award. In addition to her Ph.D., she has a Master of Legal Studies from Yale Law School, has been mentored by some of the greatest names in the history of her field, sits on the board of Roanoke College—where she received one of her five degrees—and founded and directs her own think tank, the Veritas Institute.