Hill Leans on Family, Faith During Tense Day : Inquiry: She spends the evening before in prayer and reflection. Her parents and six siblings attend testimony.

When Anita Faye Hill arrived for her momentous confrontation on Capitol Hill Friday morning, she was carrying a Bible in her purse. It was her personal Bible, one that she had brought with her from home.

And the evening before, after an affectionate reunion, members of her family had gathered at a friend’s Washington home for an evening of prayer and reflection.

It was her family and her faith that seemed to sustain her throughout the long, grueling hours under a bank of hot television lights and the scrutiny of Senate Judiciary Committee members as she outlined in calm, measured tones the graphic incidents that are the substance of her allegations against Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas.

“What happened . . . and telling the world about it are the two most difficult things--experiences of my life,” she said, dressed in a turquoise suit and sitting ramrod straight behind a microphone on a table draped with green cloth. “It is only after a great deal of agonizing . . . and sleepless nights--that I am able to talk of these unpleasant matters to anyone but my close friends.”

And during the lunch break--only minutes after Hill and her family were whisked down a long Senate corridor to a secluded room for sandwiches, potato chips and soda--they paused to pray again, this time led by a local preacher, the Rev. H. Beecher Hicks, pastor of Washington’s Metropolitan Baptist Church.

“We asked the Lord to keep us strong,” said Ray Hill, her 41-year-old brother, a middle school social studies and English teacher who lives in Kansas City. “We know he will be with her. There’s no doubt.”

She began the day waiting at a hotel room several blocks away, putting the finishing touches on her opening testimony. Thomas had concluded his passionate and moving statement of denial. Suddenly the phone rang. It was one of her lawyers: “The time is now,” he said. “Let’s go.”

The committee had abruptly decided to summon her--another jarring change in a series of schedule jockeying that had begun the day before. It was 11 o’clock the night before when she was told that she would not speak first after all.

She had to get to the hearing quickly. And she and Thomas were to engage in a curious minuet of arrival and departure.

Hill emerged from an elevator--almost unnoticed--seconds after a phalanx of cameras and reporters stalked Thomas and his wife from the hearing room, and past the same elevator. As Thomas ducked into the office of Sen. John C. Danforth (R-Mo.), his staunchest supporter and former boss, Hill came out of the elevator and up the staircase. There was no face-to-face meeting.

Because of the sudden change in plans, though, her family members could not get to the hearing room in time for her opening statement. They arrived, but the doors had been sealed by the order of Committee Chairman Joseph R. Biden Jr. (D-Del.) until Hill finished speaking. So they had to listen from outside.

But once she was finished, Biden asked her to introduce her family.

“My family members haven’t arrived,” she said. “They’re outside the door.”

“We’ll make room for them,” Biden said.

“It’s a very large family,” she relied, inspiring one of the few moments of laughter to penetrate the hearing room.

When the doors opened, she was surrounded. She was flanked by her 79-year-old parents--her mother, Erma, whom she pointed out “will be celebrating her 80th birthday on the 16th,” and her father, Albert, who traveled on an airplane for the first time in his life to be with her--five sisters and brother Ray, six of the 13 siblings in the family. Her father, as had her mother, leaned down to give her a hug before he sat down.

Hill’s friends and family said that this has been “a challenging time for her” but that she has the strength to see it through--even as the Senate inquiry focused on her credibility.

“I would not lie to get attention,” she insisted, responding to one senator’s question. “I have nothing to gain,” she would say later.

Ray Hill, standing outside in the ornate hallway, agreed.

“My sister is telling the truth,” he said. “I can see it in her face. She knows she has nothing to fear because she is telling the truth. I know he’s lying--because I know my sister. Why would she make up such a fantasy? She’s doing this because she thinks it’s the right thing to do. And it is.”

Friends and associates of Hill’s said that she had been worried about how her family would react to the senators’ grilling and to hearing her describe in explicit terms conversations about sex and pornography. It was not something she wanted to do, they said.

“She was torn between the vulgarity of the matter and the advice of some of her women advisers,” said John Frank, one of her attorneys. “They told her there was no other way in the world to know what women have to put up with but to tell it like it is.”

Her family encouraged her, Ray Hill said, even though they knew how painful it would be for them--and for her.

“Naturally my parents are disturbed, because this is their baby,” he said. “But they know these things are important. They know these are things that must be said.”