Zami

by Audre Lorde

  Of course, Ann Archdeacon was nominated immediately. She was not only the most popular girl in the school, she was the prettiest. Ilene Crimmons was also nominated, her blonde curls and favored status with the Monsignor guaranteed that.

  I lent Jim Moriarty ten cents, stolen from my father’s pocket at lunchtime, so Jim nominated me. A titter went through the class, but I ignored it. I was in seventh heaven. I knew I was the smartest girl in the class. I had to win.

  That afternoon when my mother came home from the office, I told her about the election, and how I was going to run, and win. She was furious.

  ‘What in hell are you doing getting yourself involved with so much foolishness? You don’t have better sense in your head than that? What-the-france do you need with election? We send you to school to work, not to prance about with president-this election-that. Get down the rice, girl, and stop talking your foolishness.’ We started preparing the food.

  ‘But I just might win, Mommy. Sister Blanche said it should go to the smartest girl in the class.’ I wanted her to see how important it was to me.

  ‘Don’t bother me with that nonsense. I don’t want to hear any more about it. And don’t come in here on Friday with a long face, and any “I didn’t win, Mommy”, because I don’t want to hear that, either. Your father and I have enough trouble to keep among-you in school, never mind election.’

  I dropped the subject.

  The week was a very long and exciting one for me. The only way I could get attention from my classmates in the sixth grade was by having money, and thanks to carefully planned forays into my father’s pants pockets every night that week, I made sure I had plenty. Every day at noon, I dashed across the street, gobbled down whatever food my mother had left for my lunch, and headed for the schoolyard.

  Sometimes when I came home for lunch my father was asleep in my parents’ bedroom before he returned to work. I now had my very own room, and my two sisters shared another. The day before the election, I tiptoed through the house to the closed french doors of my parents’ bedroom, and through a crack in the portières peeked in upon my sleeping father. The doors seemed to shake with his heavy snoring. I watched his mouth open and close a little with each snore, stentorian rattles erupting below his nuzzled moustache. The covers thrown partially back, to reveal his hands in sleep tucked into the top of his drawstring pajamas. He was lying on his side toward me, and the front of his pajama pants had fallen open. I could see only shadows of the vulnerable secrets shading the gap in his clothing, but I was suddenly shaken by this so-human image of him, and the idea that I could spy upon him and he not be aware of it, even in his sleep. I stepped back and closed the door quickly, embarrassed and ashamed of my own curiosity, but wishing his pajamas had gapped more so that I could finally know what exactly was the mysterious secret men carried between their legs.

  When I was ten, a little boy on the rooftop had taken off my glasses, and so seeing little, all I could remember of that encounter, when I remembered it at all, was a long thin pencil-like thing that I knew couldn’t have any relationship to my father.

  Before I closed the door, though, I slipped my hand around the door-curtains to where Daddy’s suit hung. I separated a dollar bill from the thin roll which he carried in his pants pocket. Then I retreated back into the kitchen, washed my plate and glass, and hurried back to school. I had electioneering to do.

  I knew better than to say another word to my mother about the presidency, but that week was filled with fantasies of how I would break the news to her on Friday when she came home.

  ‘Oh, Mommy, by the way, can I stay later at school on Monday for a presidents’ meeting?’ Or ‘Mother, would you please sign this note saying it is all right for me to accept the presidency?’ Or maybe even, ‘Mother, could I have a little get-together here to celebrate the election?’

  On Friday, I tied a ribbon around the steel barrette that held my unruly mass of hair tightly at the nape of my neck. Elections were to be held in the afternoon, and when I got home for lunch, for the first time in my life, I was too excited to eat. I buried the can of Campbell’s soup that my mother had left out for me way behind the other cans in the pantry and hoped she had not counted how many were left.

  We filed out of the schoolyard and up the stairs to the sixth grade room. The walls were still lined with bits of green from the recent St Patrick’s Day decorations. Sister Blanche passed out little pieces of blank paper for our ballots.

  The first rude awakening came when she announced that the boy chosen would be president, but the girl would only be vice-president. I thought this was monstrously unfair. Why not the other way around? Since we could not, as she explained, have two presidents, why not a girl president and a boy vice-president? It doesn’t really matter, I said to myself. I can live with being vice-president.

  I voted for myself. The ballots were collected and passed to the front of the room and duly counted. James O’Connor won for the boys. Ann Archdeacon won for the girls. Ilene Crimmons came in second. I got four votes, one of which was mine. I was in shock. We all clapped for the winners, and Ann Archdeacon turned around in her seat and smiled her shit-eating smile at me. ‘Too bad you lost.’ I smiled back. I wanted to break her face off.

  I was too much my mother’s daughter to let anyone think it mattered. But I felt I had been destroyed. How could this have happened? I was the smartest girl in the class. I had not been elected vice-president. It was as simple as that. But something was escaping me. Something was terribly wrong. It wasn’t fair.

  A sweet little girl named Helen Ramsey had decided it was her christian duty to befriend me, and she had once lent me her sled during the winter. She lived next to the church, and after school, that day, she invited me to her house for a cup of cocoa. I ran away without answering, dashing across the street and into the safety of my house. I ran up the stairs, my bookbag banging against my legs. I pulled out the key pinned to my uniform pocket and unlocked the door to our apartment. The house was warm and dark and empty and quiet. I did not stop running until I got to my room at the front of the house, where I flung my books and my coat in a corner and collapsed upon my convertible couch-bed, shrieking with fury and disappointment. Finally, in the privacy of my room, I could shed the tears that had been burning my eyes for two hours, and I wept and wept.

  I had wanted other things before that I had not gotten. So much so, that I had come to believe if I really wanted something badly enough, the very act of my wanting it was an assurance that I would not get it. Was this what had happened with the election? Had I wanted it too much? Was this what my mother was always talking about? Why she had been so angry? Because wanting meant I would not get? But somehow this felt different. This was the first time that I had wanted something so badly, the getting of which I was sure I could control. The election was supposed to have gone to the smartest girl in the class, and I was clearly the smartest. That was something I had done, on my own, that should have guaranteed me the election. The smartest, not the most popular. That was me. But it hadn’t happened. My mother had been right. I hadn’t won the election. My mother had been right.

  This thought hurt me almost as much as the loss of the election, and when I felt it fully I shrieked with renewed vigor. I luxuriated in my grief in the empty house in a way I could never have done if anyone were home.

  All the way up front and buried in my tears, kneeling with my face in the cushions of my couch, I did not hear the key in the lock, nor the main door open. The first thing I knew, there was my mother standing in the doorway of my room, a frown of concern in her voice.

  ‘What happened, what happened? What’s wrong with you? What’s this racket going on here?’

  I turned my wet face up to her from the couch. I wanted a little comfort in my pain, and getting up, I started moving toward her.

  ‘I lost the election, Mommy,’ I cried, forgetting her warnings. ‘I’m the smartest girl in class, Sister Blanche says so, and they chose Ann Archdeacon inst
ead!’ The unfairness of it all flooded over me again and my voice cracked into fresh sobs.

  Through my tears, I saw my mother’s face stiffen with rage. Her eyebrows drew together as her hand came up, still holding her handbag. I stopped in my tracks as her first blow caught me full on the side of my head. My mother was no weakling, and I backed away, my ears ringing. The whole world seemed to be going insane. It was only then I remembered our earlier conversations.

  ‘See, the bird forgets, but the trap doesn’t! I warned you! What you think you doing coming into this house wailing about election? If I told you once I have told you a hundred times, don’t chase yourself behind these people, haven’t I? What kind of ninny raise up here to think those good-for-nothing white piss-jets would pass over some little jacabat girl to elect you anything?’ Smack! ‘What did I say to you just now?’ She cuffed me again, this time on my shoulders, as I huddled to escape her rain of furious blows, and the edges of her pocketbook.

  ‘Sure enough, didn’t I tell you not to come in here bringing down tears over some worthless fool election?’ Smack! ‘What the hell you think we send you to school for?’ Smack! ‘Don’t run yourself behind other people’s business, you’ll do better. Dry up, now, dry up!’ Smack! She pulled me to my feet from where I had sunk back onto the couch.

  ‘Is cry you want to cry? I’ll give you something hard to cry on!’ And she cuffed me again, this time more lightly. ‘Now get yourself up from there and stop acting like some stupid fool, worrying yourself about these people’s business that doesn’t concern you. Get-the-france out of here and wipe up your face. Start acting like a human being!’

  Pushing me ahead of her, my mother marched back through the parlor and into the kitchen. ‘I come in here tired from the street and here you, acting like the world is ending. I thought sure enough some terrible thing happened to you, come to find out it’s only election. Now help me put away this foodstuff.’

  I was relieved to hear her tone mollify, as I wiped my eyes. But I still gave her heavy hands a wide berth.

  ‘It’s just that it’s not fair, Mother. That’s all I was crying about,’ I said, opening the brown paper bags on the table. To admit I had been hurt would somehow put me in the wrong for feeling pain. ‘It wasn’t the election I cared about so much really, just that it was all so unfair.’

  ‘Fair, fair, what’s fair, you think? Is fair you want, look in god’s face.’ My mother was busily dropping onions into the bin. She paused, and turning around, held my puffy face up, her hand beneath my chin. Her eyes so sharp and furious before, now just looked tired and sad.

  ‘Child, why you worry your head so much over fair or not fair? Just do what is for you to do and let the rest take care of themselves.’ She smoothed straggles of hair back from my face, and I felt the anger gone from her fingers. ‘Look, you hair all mess-up behind from rolling around with foolishness. Go wash your face and hands and come help me dress this fish for supper.’

  9

  Except for political matters, my father was a man of few words. But he carried on extensive conversations with himself in the bathroom every morning.

  During the last years of the war, my father could be found more often away from home than not, or at best, sleeping a few hours before going back out to his night job at the war plant.

  My mother would rush home from the office, market, fuss with us a little, and fix supper. Phyllis, Helen, or I would have put on the rice or potatoes already, and maybe my mother had seasoned some meat earlier in the day and left it on the stove with a note for one of us to turn on the fire low under the pot when we came home. Or perhaps there would be something left on purpose from last night’s supper (‘Leave some of that for your father’s dinner tomorrow!’). On those afternoons, I didn’t wait for my mother to come home. Instead, I packed the food up myself and took off downtown on the bus, headed for my father’s office.

  I heated each separate portion until it was piping hot. Carefully, I packed the hot rice and savory bits of meat stew or spicy chicken and gravy into scoured milk bottles which we saved for that purpose. I packed the vegetables separately in their own bottle, with a little pat of butter if we could get it, or margarine, on top. I wrapped each bottle in layers of newspapers, and then in an old towel, to keep the food warm. Placing them in a shopping bag together with the shirt and sweater that my mother had left for me to take to my father, I set off by bus down to the office, heavy with a sense of mission and accomplishment.

  The bus from Washington Heights ran downtown and across 125th Street. I got off at Lenox Avenue, and walked the three blocks up to the office, past bars and grocery stores and small groups of people in lively conversation on the street.

  Sometimes when I arrived, my father was downstairs in the office already, poring over receipt books or taxes or bills. Sometimes he was still asleep in a room upstairs, and the janitor had to go up and knock on the room door to waken him. I was never allowed to go upstairs, nor to enter the room where my father slept. I always wondered what mysteries occurred ‘upstairs’, and what it was up there my parents never wanted me to see. I think it was that same vulnerability that had so shocked and embarrassed me the day I peered into their bedroom at home. His ordinary humanity.

  When my father came downstairs, I kissed him hello, and he went into the back of the office to wash his face and hands preparatory to eating. I spread out the meal carefully, on a special desk in the back room. If anyone came in to see my father while he was eating, I wrote out a receipt, proudly, or relayed the message to him in the back room. For my father, eating was too human a pastime to allow just anyone to see him at it.

  If no one came in, I sat quietly in the back room and watched him eat. He was meticulously neat, placing his bones in even rows on the paper towel beside his plate. Sometimes my father looked up and saw me watching him, and he reached out and gave me a morsel of meat or a taste of rice and gravy from his plate.

  Other times I sat with my book, quietly reading, but secretly waiting and hoping for this special treat. Even if I had already just eaten the same food, or even if it was some dish I did not particularly like, these tastes of my father’s food from his plate in the back room of his office had an enchantment to them that was delicious and magical, and precious. They form the fondest and closest memories I have of warm moments shared with my father. There were not many.

  When my father was finished with his meal, I rinsed out the bottles, and washed his dish and silverware. I placed them back upon the shelf especially cleared for them, and covered them with the cloth napkin that was kept there for that purpose, to protect them from the dust of the back room. I carefully repacked the bottles into the shopping bag, and took the nickel carfare that my father gave me for the bus trip back. I kissed him goodbye and headed for home.

  Sometimes no more than two or three sentences passed between us during the whole time we were together in the office. But I remember those evenings, particularly in the springtime, as very special and satisfying times.

  10

  The first time I went to Washington, DC was on the edge of the summer when I was supposed to stop being a child. At least that’s what they said to us all at graduation from the eighth grade. My sister Phyllis graduated at the same time from high school. I don’t know what she was supposed to stop being. But as graduation presents for us both, the whole family took a Fourth of July trip to Washington, DC, the fabled and famous capital of our country.

  It was the first time I’d ever been on a railroad train during the day. When I was little, and we used to go the Connecticut shore, we always went at night on the milk train, because it was cheaper.

  Preparations were in the air around our house before school was even over. We packed for a week. There were two very large suitcases that my father carried, and a box filled with food. In fact, my first trip to Washington was a mobile feast; I started eating as soon as we were comfortably ensconced in our seats, and did not stop until somewhere after Philadelphia. I rem
ember it was Philadelphia because I was disappointed not to have passed by the Liberty Bell.

  My mother had roasted two chickens and cut them up into dainty bite-size pieces. She packed slices of brown bread and butter and green pepper and carrot sticks. There were little violently yellow iced cakes with scalloped edges called ‘marigolds’, that came from Cushman’s Bakery. There was a spice bun and rock-cakes from Newton’s, the West Indian bakery across Lenox Avenue from St Mark’s School, and iced tea in a wrapped mayonnaise jar. There were sweet pickles for us and dill pickles for my father, and peaches with the fuzz still on them, individually wrapped to keep them from bruising. And, for neatness, there were piles of napkins and a little tin box with a washcloth dampened with rosewater and glycerine for wiping sticky mouths.

  I wanted to eat in the dining car because I had read all about them, but my mother reminded me for the umpteenth time that dining car food always cost too much money and besides, you never could tell whose hands had been playing all over that food, nor where those same hands had been just before. My mother never mentioned that Black people were not allowed into railroad dining cars headed south in 1947. As usual, whatever my mother did not like and could not change, she ignored. Perhaps it would go away, deprived of her attention.

  I learned later that Phyllis’s high school senior class trip had been to Washington, but the nuns had given her back her deposit in private, explaining to her that the class, all of whom were white, except Phyllis, would be staying in a hotel where Phyllis ‘would not be happy’, meaning, Daddy explained to her, also in private, that they did not rent rooms to Negroes. ‘We will take among-you to Washington, ourselves,’ my father had avowed, ‘and not just for an overnight in some measly fleabag hotel.’

  American racism was a new and crushing reality that my parents had to deal with every day of their lives once they came to this country. They handled it as a private woe. My mother and father believed that they could best protect their children from the realities of race in america and the fact of american racism by never giving them name, much less discussing their nature. We were told we must never trust white people, but why was never explained, nor the nature of their ill will. Like so many other vital pieces of information in my childhood, I was supposed to know without being told. It always seemed like a very strange injunction coming from my mother, who looked so much like one of those people we were never supposed to trust. But something always warned me not to ask my mother why she wasn’t white, and why Auntie Lillah and Auntie Etta weren’t, even though they were all that same problematic color so different from my father and me, even from my sisters, who were somewhere in-between.