by Audre Lorde
In Washington, DC we had one large room with two double beds and an extra cot for me. It was a back-street hotel that belonged to a friend of my father’s who was in real estate, and I spent the whole next day after Mass squinting up at the Lincoln Memorial where Marian Anderson had sung after the DAR refused to allow her to sing in their auditorium because she was Black. Or because she was ‘Colored’, my father said as he told us the story. Except that what he probably said was ‘Negro’, because for his times, my father was quite progressive.
I was squinting because I was in that silent agony that characterized all of my childhood summers, from the time school let out in June to the end of July, brought about by my dilated and vulnerable eyes exposed to the summer brightness.
I viewed Julys through an agonizing corolla of dazzling whiteness and I always hated the Fourth of July, even before I came to realize the travesty such a celebration was for Black people in this country.
My parents did not approve of sunglasses, nor of their expense.
I spent the afternoon squinting up at monuments to freedom and past presidencies and democracy, and wondering why the light and heat were both so much stronger in Washington, DC than back home in New York City. Even the pavement on the streets was a shade lighter in color than back home.
Late that Washington afternoon my family and I walked back down Pennsylvania Avenue. We were a proper caravan, mother bright and father brown, the three of us girls step-standards in-between. Moved by our historical surroundings and the heat of the early evening, my father decreed yet another treat. He had a great sense of history, a flair for the quietly dramatic and the sense of specialness of an occasion and a trip.
‘Shall we stop and have a little something to cool off, Lin?’
Two blocks away from our hotel, the family stopped for a dish of vanilla ice cream at a Breyer’s ice cream and soda fountain. Indoors, the soda fountain was dim and fan-cooled, deliciously relieving to my scorched eyes.
Corded and crisp and pinafored, the five of us seated ourselves one by one at the counter. There was I between my mother and father, and my two sisters on the other side of my mother. We settled ourselves along the white mottled marble counter, and when the waitress spoke at first no one understood what she was saying, and so the five of us just sat there.
The waitress moved along the line of us closer to my father and spoke again. ‘I said I kin give you to take out, but you can’t eat here. Sorry.’ Then she dropped her eyes looking very embarrassed, and suddenly we heard what it was she was saying all at the same time, loud and clear.
Straight-backed and indignant, one by one, my family and I got down from the counter stools and turned around and marched out of the store, quiet and outraged, as if we had never been Black before. No one would answer my emphatic questions with anything other than a guilty silence. ‘But we hadn’t done anything!’ This wasn’t right or fair! Hadn’t I written poems about Bataan and freedom and democracy for all?
My parents wouldn’t speak of this injustice, not because they had contributed to it, but because they felt they should have anticipated it and avoided it. This made me even angrier. My fury was not going to be acknowledged by a like fury. Even my two sisters copied my parents’ pretense that nothing unusual and anti-american had occurred. I was left to write my angry letter to the president of the united states all by myself, although my father did promise I could type it out on the office typewriter next week, after I showed it to him in my copybook diary.
The waitress was white, and the counter was white, and the ice cream I never ate in Washington, DC that summer I left childhood was white, and the white heat and the white pavement and the white stone monuments of my first Washington summer made me sick to my stomach for the whole rest of that trip and it wasn’t much of a graduation present after all.
11
When I was growing up in my mother’s house, there were spices you grated and spices you pounded, and whenever you pounded spice and garlic or other herbs, you used a mortar. Every West Indian woman worth her salt had her own mortar. Now if you lost or broke your mortar, you could, of course, buy another one in the market over on Park Avenue, under the bridge, but those were usually Puerto Rican mortars, and even though they were made out of wood and worked exactly the same way, somehow they were never really as good as West Indian mortars. Now where the best mortars came from I was never really sure, but I knew it must be in the vicinity of that amorphous and mystically perfect place called ‘home’. And whatever came from ‘home’ was bound to be special.
My mother’s mortar was an elaborate affair, quite at variance with most of her other possessions, and certainly with her projected public view of herself. It stood, solid and elegant, on a shelf in the kitchen cabinet for as long as I can remember, and I loved it dearly.
The mortar was of a foreign fragrant wood, too dark for cherry and too red for walnut. To my child eyes, the outside was carved in an intricate and most enticing manner. There were rounded plums and oval indeterminate fruit, some long and fluted like a banana, others ovular and end-swollen like a ripe alligator pear. In between these were smaller rounded shapes like cherries, lying in batches against and around each other.
I loved to finger the hard roundness of the carved fruit, and the always surprising termination of the shapes as the carvings stopped at the rim and the bowl sloped abruptly downward, smoothly oval but suddenly businesslike. The heavy sturdiness of this useful wooden object always made me feel secure and somehow full; as if it conjured up from all the many different flavors pounded into the inside wall, visions of delicious feasts both once enjoyed and still to come.
The pestle was long and tapering, fashioned from the same mysterious rose-deep wood, and fitted into the hand almost casually, familiarly. The actual shape reminded me of a summer crook-necked squash uncurled and slightly twisted. It could also have been an avocado, with the neck of the alligator pear elongated and the whole made efficient for pounding, without ever losing the apparent soft firmness and the character of the fruit which the wood suggested. It was slightly bigger at the grinding end than most pestles, and the widened curved end fitted into the bowl of the mortar easily. Long use and years of impact and grinding within the bowl’s worn hollow had softened the very surface of the wooden pestle, until a thin layer of split fibers coated the rounded end like a layer of velvet. A layer of the same velvety mashed wood lined the bottom inside the sloping bowl.
My mother did not particularly like to pound spice, and she looked upon the advent of powdered everything as a cook’s boon. But there were some certain dishes that called for a particular savory blending of garlic, raw onion, and pepper, and souse was one of them.
For our mother’s souse, it didn’t matter what kind of meat was used. You could have hearts, or beefends, or even chicken backs and gizzards when we were really poor. It was the pounded-up saucy blend of herb and spice rubbed into the meat before it was left to stand so for a few hours before cooking that made that dish so special and unforgettable. But my mother had some very firm ideas about what she liked best to cook and about which were her favorite dishes, and souse was definitely not one of either.
On the very infrequent occasions that my mother would allow one of us three girls to choose a meal – as opposed to helping to prepare it, which was a daily routine – on those occasions my sisters would usually choose one of those proscribed dishes so dear to our hearts remembered from our relatives’ tables, contraband, and so very rare in our house. They might ask for hot dogs, perhaps, smothered in ketchup sauce, or with crusty Boston-baked beans, or american chicken, breaded first and fried crispy the way the southern people did it; or creamed something-or-other that one of my sisters had tasted at school; what-have-you croquettes or anything fritters; or once even a daring outrageous request for slices of fresh watermelon, hawked from the back of a rickety wooden pickup truck with the southern road-dust still on her slatted sides, from which a young bony Black man with a turned-around base
ball cap on his head would hang and half-yell, half-yodel – ‘Wahr–deeeeeee-mayyyyyyy-lawnnnnnnn.’
There were many american dishes I longed for too, but on the one or two occasions a year that I got to choose a meal, I would always ask for souse. That way, I knew that I would get to use my mother’s mortar, and this in itself was more treat for me than any of the forbidden foods. Besides, if I really wanted hot dogs or anything croquettes badly enough, I could steal some money from my father’s pocket and buy them in the school lunch.
‘Mother, let’s have souse,’ I’d say, and never even stop to think about it. The anticipated taste of the soft spicy meat had become inseparable in my mind from the tactile pleasures of using my mother’s mortar.
‘But what makes you think anybody can find time to mash up all that stuff?’ My mother would cut her hawk-grey eyes at me from beneath their heavy black brows. ‘Among-you children never stop to think’, and she’d turn back to whatever it was she had been doing. If she had just come from the office with my father, she might be checking the day’s receipts, or she might be washing the endless piles of dirty linen that always seemed to issue from rooming-houses.
‘Oh, I’ll pound the garlic, Mommy!’ would be my next line in the script written by some ancient and secret hand, and off I’d go to the cabinet to get down the heavy wooden mortar and pestle.
I took a head of garlic out from the garlic bottle in the icebox, and breaking off ten or twelve cloves from the head, I carefully peeled away the tissue lavender skin, slicing each stripped peg in half lengthwise. I dropped them piece by piece into the capacious waiting bowl of the mortar. Taking a slice from a small onion, I put the rest aside to be used later over the meat, and cutting the slice into quarters, I tossed it into the mortar also. Next came the coarsely ground fresh black pepper, and then a lavish blanketing cover of salt over the whole. Last, if we had any, a few leaves from the top of a head of celery. My mother sometimes added a slice of green pepper, but I did not like the texture of the pepper-skin under the pestle, and preferred to add it along with the sliced onion later on, leaving it all to sit over the seasoned and resting meat.
After all the ingredients were in the bowl of the mortar, I fetched the pestle and placing it into the bowl, slowly rotated the shaft a few times, working it gently down through all the ingredients to mix them. Only then would I lift the pestle, and with one hand firmly pressed around the carved side of the mortar caressing the wooden fruit with my aromatic fingers, I thrust sharply downward, feeling the shifting salt and the hard little pellets of garlic right up through the shaft of the wooden pestle. Up again, down, around, and up – so the rhythm began.
The thud push rub rotate up repeated over and over. The muted thump of the pestle on the bed of grinding spice as the salt and pepper absorbed the slowly yielding juices of the garlic and celery leaves.
Thud push rub rotate up. The mingling fragrances rising from the bowl of the mortar.
Thud push rub rotate up. The feeling of the pestle held between my curving fingers, and the mortar’s outside rounding like fruit into my palm as I steadied it against my body.
All these transported me into a world of scent and rhythm and movement and sound that grew more and more exciting as the ingredients liquefied.
Sometimes my mother would look over at me with that amused annoyance which passed for tenderness.
‘What you think you making there, garlic soup? Enough, go get the meat now.’ And I would fetch the lamb hearts, for instance, from the icebox and begin to prepare them. Cutting away the hardened veins at the top of the smooth firm muscles, I divided each oval heart into four wedge-shaped pieces, and taking a bit of the spicy mash from the mortar with my fingertips, I rubbed each piece with the savory mix, the pungent smell of garlic and onion and celery enveloping the kitchen.
The last day I ever pounded seasoning for souse was in the summer of my fifteenth year. It had been a fairly unpleasant summer for me. I had just finished my first year in high school. Instead of being able to visit my newly found friends, all of whom lived in other parts of the city, I had had to accompany my mother on a round of doctors with whom she would have long whispered conversations. Only a matter of utmost importance could have kept her away from the office for so many mornings in a row. But my mother was concerned because I was fourteen and a half years old and had not yet menstruated. I had breasts but no period, and she was afraid there was something ‘wrong’ with me. Yet, since she had never discussed this mysterious business of menstruation with me, I was certainly not supposed to know what all this whispering was about, even though it concerned my own body.
Of course, I knew as much as I could have possibly found out in those days from the hard-to-get books on the ‘closed shelf’ behind the librarian’s desk at the public library, where I had brought a forged note from home in order to be allowed to read them, sitting under the watchful eye of the librarian at a special desk reserved for that purpose.
Although not terribly informative, they were fascinating books, and used words like menses and ovulation and vagina.
But four years before, I had had to find out if I was going to become pregnant, because a boy from school much bigger than me had invited me up to the roof on my way home from the library and then threatened to break my glasses if I didn’t let him stick his ‘thing’ between my legs. And at that time I knew only that being pregnant had something to do with sex, and sex had something to do with that thin pencil-like ‘thing’ and was in general nasty and not to be talked about by nice people, and I was afraid my mother might find out and what would she do to me then? I was not supposed to be looking at the mailboxes in the hallway of that house anyway, even though Doris was a girl in my class at St Mark’s who lived in that house and I was always so lonely in the summer, particularly that summer when I was ten.
So after I got home I washed myself up and lied about why I was late getting home from the library and got a whipping for being late. That must have been a hard summer for my parents at the office too, because that was the summer that I got a whipping for something or other almost every day between the Fourth of July and Labor Day.
When I wasn’t getting whippings, I hid out at the library on 135th Street, and forged notes from my mother to get books from the ‘closed shelf’, and read about sex and having babies, and waited to become pregnant. None of the books were very clear to me about the relationship between having your period and having a baby, but they were all very clear about the relationship between penises and getting pregnant. Or maybe the confusion was all in my own mind, because I had always been a very fast but not a very careful reader.
So four years later, in my fifteenth year, I was a very scared little girl, still half-afraid that one of that endless stream of doctors would look up into my body and discover my four-year-old shame and say to my mother, ‘Aha! So that’s what’s wrong! Your daughter is about to become pregnant!’
On the other hand, if I let Mother know that I knew what was happening and what these medical safaris were all about, I would have to answer her questions about how and wherefore I knew, since she hadn’t told me, divulging in the process the whole horrible and self-incriminating story of forbidden books and forged library notes and rooftops and stairwell conversations.
It was a year after the rooftop incident, when we had moved farther uptown. The kids at St Catherine’s seemed to know a lot more about sex than at St Mark’s. In the eighth grade, I had stolen money and bought my classmate Adeline a pack of cigarettes and she had confirmed my bookish suspicions about how babies were made. My response to her graphic descriptions had been to think to myself, there obviously must be another way that Adeline doesn’t know about, because my parents have children and I know they never did anything like that! But the basic principles were all there, and sure enough they were the same as I had gathered from The Young People’s Family Book.
So in my fifteenth summer, on examining table after examining table, I kept my legs open and my m
outh shut, and when I saw blood on my pants one hot July afternoon, I rinsed them out secretly in the bathroom and put them back on wet because I didn’t know how to break the news to my mother that both her worries and mine were finally over. (All this time I had at least understood that having your period was a sign you were not pregnant.)
What then happened felt like a piece of an old and elaborate dance between my mother and me. She discovers finally, through a stain on the toilet seat left there on purpose by me as a mute announcement, what has taken place; she scolds, ‘Why didn’t you tell me about all of this, now? It’s nothing to get upset over, you are a woman, not a child anymore. Now you go over to the drugstore and ask the man for …’
I was just relieved the whole damn thing was over with. It’s difficult to talk about double messages without having a twin tongue. Nightmarish evocations and restrictions were being verbalized by my mother:
‘This means from now on you better watch your step and not be so friendly with every Tom, Dick, and Harry …’ (Which must have meant my staying late after school to talk with my girlfriends, because I did not even know any boys); and, ‘Now remember, too, after you wrap up your soiled napkins in newspaper, don’t leave them hanging around on the bathroom floor where your father has to see them, not that it’s anything shameful but all the same, remember …’
