Zami

by Audre Lorde

  Instead, in newscast after newscast, grave and excited voices were talking of death and destruction and casualties and burning ships and brave men and war. I finally put down my fairy tales to listen more intently, captivated and frightened by the high drama swirling around me, and for once wise enough to keep my mouth shut. But my parents were too engrossed in the reports to think of banishing me to the kitchen. Even supper was later than usual that night.

  My mother said something in patois and my father answered. Watching their eyes I could tell they were talking about the office and money. My mother got up and went back to the kitchen.

  ‘Bee, it’s time to eat,’ my mother called, finally, reappearing at the parlor door. ‘There’s nothing we can do about this.’

  ‘You said it, Lin. But war is here.’ My father reached over and clicked off the radio, and we all went into the kitchen to supper.

  A few days later, after school, all the students were lined up in the auditorium, class by class, and the nuns issued us little cream-colored bone discs that were engraved in blue ink with name, address, age, and something called blood type. Each one of us was to wear this disc around the neck on a long nickel chain with no catch, and this was never never to be taken off for the duration, under pain of mortal sin, or worse.

  That phrase, for the duration, began to assume a tangible life and energy all its own, like infinity, or forever.

  The nuns told us that gas masks were coming later, and we should all pray that we did not have to do like the poor little english children did – leave their parents and be sent away into the countryside for safety. In my secret heart of hearts I thought that was a very exciting prospect, and hoped it might come to pass. I bent my head with the others, but could not bring myself to pray that it wouldn’t happen.

  Then we said another ten Our Fathers and ten Hail Marys for the souls of the brave young men who had lost their lives at Pearl Harbor the Sunday before, and then five more of each for the starving children in Europe.

  When we had finished praying, we all stood up, and Mother Josepha showed us how to cross our arms over our chests and touch the opposite shoulder, the safest position in case we fell while running. Then we practiced how to run to the basement of the church through a connecting passageway during an air-raid drill. We practiced air-raid drills until we could do them absolutely silently and quickly. I began to be impressed with the seriousness of it all, as this went on for what felt like hours, while our mothers sat and waited in the auditorium. It was almost twilight by the time we were finally on our way home through the December cold, and the streets looked odd and eerie with the streetlamps dimmed and already capped on top, and the store windows shrouded in the blackout.

  The following spring, all the mothers were asked to come to school on some regular basis to help watch the skies for enemy aircraft that might have slipped by our shore defenses. Mothers all over New York City were doing the same thing from the roofs of schoolhouses. Because of the careful censorship of the news, I don’t think any of us, including our parents, realized how real a threat offshore shelling was, for there actually were german submarines in Long Island Sound. All we knew was that, perched as it was on the east coast facing Europe, New York City was a prime target for bombing.

  Even simple conversation became suspect. Silence was golden, didn’t all the posters say so? Despite the fact that I had no secrets at all to tell, I always felt a pang of self-righteous pleasure whenever I passed the corner lamp post at 140th Street and Lenox Avenue. From it hung a brightly colored sign of a white man with his fingers to his lips. Beneath his half-turned face in big block letters it warned: A SLIP OF THE LIP MAY SINK A SHIP! I felt my silences socially and patriotically endorsed.

  But meanwhile, life went on almost as usual, and it was hard at seven to distinguish between this real-life drama and the ones I was addicted to on the radio.

  The mothers at St Mark’s watched for enemy planes from a roof culvert that adjoined the third grade classroom and was reached through a doorway in the front of our room. We had spelling right before lunch in the third grade, and my mother’s turn to watch was from 11:00 A.M. to 12 noon.

  I bent over my spelling book in the warm spring light, my stomach grumbling and anxious for lunch. Just outside the window, I could see my mother standing in her dowdy dark woolen suit and her severe cuban-heeled oxfords, a rakishly brimmed but no-nonsense hat shading her hawk-grey eyes. Her arms were folded across her ample chest as she frowned up at the sky intently from under the brim of her hat, daring any enemy plane to appear.

  I was bursting with pride that this important woman was my mother. She was the only mother in my class who watched for airplanes, and was also involved with the mysterious process of giving out ration books from an official-looking table set up in the back of the school auditorium, on a special day set aside for that purpose. And, she was the only mother I knew who sat behind another table every Election Day in the lobby of the infamous public school, checking off voters in huge magic books, and guarding the magical, grey-curtained voting booths. Even though she was the only mother I knew who never wore lipstick, not even for Mass on Sundays, still, she was also the only mother I knew who ‘went to business’ every day.

  I was very proud of her, but sometimes, just sometimes, I wished she would be like all the other mothers, one waiting for me at home with milk and home-baked cookies and a frilly apron, like the blonde smiling mother in Dick and Jane.

  On catholic holidays or half-days when I was off from school, I loved to go down to the office with my mother and sit behind my father’s oaken desk, in his great wooden swivel chair, watching my mother write out rent receipts, or interview prospective tenants, or argue imperiously with the coal delivery man over whether the coal should be dumped on the sidewalk or into the coal bin under the street.

  During the war years, I remember days of standing beside my mother in front of the huge plate glass windows that swiveled inward, now taped up against the cold. We waited anxiously, watching up Lenox Avenue for the first glimpse of the Public Fuel coal truck that might bring whatever poor-grade coal was left from the ‘war-effort’ to take the chill off the rooms in those dreary rooming houses that she and Daddy managed. Sometimes my father would join us; more often he was either showing a house or out on some real-estate business, or doing some minor repair work in one of the rundown houses. As labor demands increased and the war went on, my father was in the office less and less, because he had taken a night job as a maintenance man in a war plant out in Queens which made aluminum fittings for airplanes. He worked the night shift, and then came to the office early in the morning straight from the war plant. He did whatever repairs or work was needed, checking for leaks in the houses’ plumbing in summer and frozen pipes in the winter. Then if he did not have another appointment to show a house, he went upstairs to a vacant room and caught a few hours’ sleep, while my mother came to the office and took care of business. If he had a real-estate appointment, he went upstairs to the room to shave and wash and change his clothes and then went out again, returning to the office in the afternoon to sleep for a few hours.

  At noontime when my mother brought us back home for lunch, she busily reheated and packed up a hot meal for my father. It usually consisted of leftovers from supper the night before, or some delicacy that she had prepared earlier that morning. She packed the food into bottles and wrapped towels around them to keep it warm, and after she dropped us off at school, she would continue on her way back to the office and either wake my father up, or await his return.

  She did the books, dealt with problems, sewed sheets and pillowcases on the Singer sewing machine kept in the back room, and made up rooms upstairs. If the woman who had been hired to clean was absent that day, my mother cleaned whatever rooms were vacant. It was soon time to fetch us home from school, ten blocks away.

  Somedays, when time and need permitted or demanded, she walked to the market on 125th Street to try and find a piece of meat for
supper, or some fresh fish and vegetables from the West Indian markets along the way. After marketing, she caught the bus back uptown to meet us at school, her arms heavy with shopping bags. On those days, her face was drawn and tired and her eyes particularly fierce as she stepped off the bus at the corner of 138th Street where the three of us stood, silently waiting and watching for her. I would try to read and decipher the expression on my mother’s face as soon as the bus stopped and she slowly descended the steps, shopping bags banging the sides of her legs. The look on her face would tell me what the tenor of our seven-block walk home would be like. A tight drawn mouth often meant a whipping for one of us, usually me, whether or not we helped her carry the packages.

  Once in the house, discipline and reprimands all had to be postponed until supper was prepared and put on the stove to cook. Then the bad reports that had been given to my sisters about me that day at school would be trotted out and examined, and my mother’s heavy-handed household justice would ensue.

  At other times, for particularly wicked and sinful infractions, the ominous verdict would be ‘Wait until your father comes home.’ My father never hit us. There was a myth abroad among the relatives that Uncle Lorde was so strong if he ever laid a hand upon you he might kill you. But his very presence at the administering of punishment made that whipping somehow official and therefore all the more terrifying and terrible. Probably the postponement and dread expectation accomplished the same effect.

  Whether it was true or not about my father’s killing power I do not know. He was a very large, strong man, and his six-foot-four-inch frame in the beach pictures of that period do not show much fat. His eyes were small but piercing, and when he set his mammoth jaw and dropped his voice to the hoarse, intense low that signified he meant business, he was very scary.

  I remember one light-hearted evening before the war when my father returned home from the office. I was sitting on my mother’s lap while she brushed my hair. My father picked us up together and swung us over his head, laughing and calling us his ‘excess baggage’. I remember being delighted and thrilled at his attention, as well as terrified by the familiar surroundings suddenly turning cro-bo-so.

  During the war, my father was almost never at home in the evenings, except on weekends, so punishment, by and large, became much more immediate.

  As the war lengthened, more and more money came into circulation among Black people, and my father’s real-estate business got better and better. After the race riots of 1943, the area around Lenox Avenue and 142nd Street became known as the ‘gutbucket’ of Harlem. My family moved ‘up the hill’, the same long series of hills that my sisters and I used to traverse on summer days to trade comic books.

  8

  As a child, the most horrible condition I could contemplate was being wrong and being discovered. Mistakes could mean exposure, maybe even annihilation. In my mother’s house, there was no room in which to make errors, no room to be wrong.

  I grew Black as my need for life, for affirmation, for love, for sharing – copying from my mother what was in her, unfulfilled. I grew Black as Seboulisa, who I was to find in the cool mud halls of Abomey several lifetimes later – and, as alone. My mother’s words teaching me all manner of wily and diversionary defenses learned from the white man’s tongue, from out of the mouth of her father. She had had to use these defenses, and had survived by them, and had also died by them a little, at the same time. All the colors change and become each other, merge and separate, flow into rainbows and nooses.

  I lie beside my sisters in the darkness, who pass me in the street unacknowledged and unadmitted. How much of this is the pretense of self-rejection that became an immovable protective mask, how much the programmed hate that we were fed to keep ourselves a part, apart?

  One day (I remember I was still in the second grade) my mother was out marketing, and my sisters were talking about someone being Colored. In my six-year-old way, I jumped at this chance to find out what it was all about.

  ‘What does Colored mean?’ I asked. To my amazement, neither one of my sisters was quite sure.

  ‘Well,’ Phyllis said. ‘The nuns are white, and the Short-Neck Store-Man is white, and Father Mulvoy is white and we’re Colored.’

  ‘And what’s Mommy? Is she white or Colored?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ answered Phyllis impatiently.

  ‘Well,’ I said, ‘if anybody asks me what I am, I’m going to tell them I’m white same as Mommy.’

  ‘Ohhhhhhhhhh, girl, you better not do that,’ they both chorused in horror.

  ‘Why not?’ I asked, more confused than ever. But neither of them could tell me why.

  That was the first and only time my sisters and I discussed race as a reality in my house, or at any rate as it applied to ourselves.

  Our new apartment was on 152nd Street between Amsterdam Avenue and Broadway in what was called Washington Heights, and already known as a ‘changing’ neighborhood, meaning one where Black people could begin to find overpriced apartments out of the depressed and decaying core of Harlem.

  The apartment house that we moved into was owned by a small landlord. We moved at the end of the summer, and I began school that year in a new catholic school which was right across the street from our house.

  Two weeks after we moved into the new apartment, our landlord hanged himself in the basement. The Daily News reported that the suicide was caused by his despondency over the fact that he finally had to rent to Negroes. I was the first Black student in St Catherine’s School, and all the white kids in my sixth grade class knew about the landlord who had hanged himself in the basement because of me and my family. He had been Jewish; I was Black. That made us both fair game for the cruel curiosity of my pre-adolescent classmates.

  Ann Archdeacon, red-headed darling of the nuns and of Monsignor Brady, was the first one to ask me what I knew about the landlord’s death. As usual, my parents had discussed the whole matter in patois, and I only read the comics in the daily paper.

  ‘I don’t know anything about it,’ I said, standing in the schoolyard at lunchtime, twisting my front braids and looking around for some friendly face. Ann Archdeacon snickered, and the rest of the group that had gathered around us to hear roared with laughter, until Sister Blanche waddled over to see what was going on.

  If the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament at St Mark’s School had been patronizing, at least their racism was couched in the terms of their mission. At St Catherine’s School, the Sisters of Charity were downright hostile. Their racism was unadorned, unexcused, and particularly painful because I was unprepared for it. I got no help at home. The children in my class made fun of my braids, so Sister Victoire, the principal, sent a note home to my mother asking her to comb my hair in a more ‘becoming’ fashion, since I was too old, she said, to wear ‘pigtails’.

  All the girls wore blue gabardine uniforms that by springtime were a little musty, despite frequent drycleanings. I would come in from recess to find notes in my desk saying ‘You Stink.’ I showed them to Sister Blanche. She told me that she felt it was her christian duty to tell me that Colored people did smell different from white people, but it was cruel of the children to write nasty notes because I couldn’t help it, and if I would remain out in the yard the next day after the rest of the class came in after lunchtime, she would talk to them about being nicer to me!

  The head of the parish and the school was Monsignor John J. Brady, who told my mother when she registered me that he had never expected to have to take Colored kids into his school. His favorite pastime was holding Ann Archdeacon or Ilene Crimmons on his lap, while he played with their blonde and red curls with one hand, and slid the other hand up the back of their blue gabardine uniforms. I did not care about his lechery, but I did care that he kept me in every Wednesday afternoon after school to memorize latin nouns.

  The other children in my class were given a cursory quiz to test their general acquaintance with the words, and then let go early, since it was the earl
y release day for religious instruction.

  I came to loathe Wednesday afternoons, sitting by myself in the classroom trying to memorize the singular and plural of a long list of latin nouns, and their genders. Every half-hour or so, Father Brady would look in from the rectory, and ask to hear the words. If I so much as hesitated over any word or its plural, or its gender, or said it out of place on the list, he would spin on his black-robed heel and disappear for another half-hour or so. Although early dismissal was at 2:00 P.M., some Wednesdays I didn’t get home until after four o’clock. Sometimes on Wednesday nights I would dream of the white, acrid-smelling mimeograph sheet: agricola, agricolae, fem., farmer. Three years later when I began Hunter High School and had to take latin in earnest, I had built up such a block to everything about it that I failed my first two terms of it.

  When I complained at home about my treatment at school, my mother would get angry with me.

  ‘What do you care what they say about you, anyway? Do they put bread on your plate? You go to school to learn, so learn and leave the rest alone. You don’t need friends.’ I did not see her helplessness, nor her pain.

  I was the smartest girl in the class, which did nothing to contribute to my popularity. But the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament had taught me well, and I was way ahead in math and mental arithmetic.

  In the spring of the sixth grade, Sister Blanche announced that we were going to hold elections for two class presidents, one boy and one girl. Anyone could run, she said, and we would vote on Friday of that week. The voting should be according to merit and effort and class spirit, she added, but the most important thing would be marks.