Zami

by Audre Lorde

  Along with all of these admonitions, there was something else coming from my mother that I could not define. It was the lurking of that amused/annoyed brow-furrowed half-smile of hers that made me feel – all her nagging words to the contrary – that something very good and satisfactory and pleasing to her had just happened, and that we were both pretending otherwise for some very wise and secret reasons. I would come to understand these reasons later, as a reward, if I handled myself properly. Then, at the end of it all, my mother thrust the box of Kotex at me (I had fetched it in its plain wrapper back from the drugstore, along with a sanitary belt), saying to me,

  ‘But look now what time it is already, I wonder what we’re going to eat for supper tonight?’ She waited. At first I didn’t understand, but I quickly picked up the cue. I had seen the beefends in the icebox that morning.

  ‘Mommy, please let’s have some souse – I’ll pound the garlic.’ I dropped the box onto a kitchen chair and started to wash my hands in anticipation.

  ‘Well, go put your business away first. What did I tell you about leaving that lying around?’ She wiped her hands from the washtub where she had been working and handed the plain wrapped box of Kotex back to me.

  ‘I have to go out, I forget to pick up tea at the store. Now make sure you rub the meat good.’

  When I came back into the kitchen, my mother had left. I moved toward the kitchen cabinet to fetch down the mortar and pestle. My body felt new and special and unfamiliar and suspect all at the same time.

  I could feel bands of tension sweeping across my body back and forth, like lunar winds across the moon’s face. I felt the slight rubbing bulge of the cotton pad between my legs, and I smelled the delicate breadfruit smell rising up from the front of my print blouse that was my own womansmell, warm, shameful, but secretly utterly delicious.

  Years afterward when I was grown, whenever I thought about the way I smelled that day, I would have a fantasy of my mother, her hands wiped dry from the washing, and her apron untied and laid neatly away, looking down upon me lying on the couch, and then slowly, thoroughly, our touching and caressing each other’s most secret places.

  I took the mortar down, and smashed the cloves of garlic with the edge of its underside, to loosen the thin papery skins in a hurry. I sliced them and flung them into the mortar’s bowl along with some black pepper and celery leaves. The white salt poured in, covering the garlic and black pepper and pale chartreuse celery fronds like a snowfall. I tossed in the onion and some bits of green pepper and reached for the pestle.

  It slipped through my fingers and clattered to the floor, rolling around in a semicircle back and forth, until I bent to retrieve it. I grabbed the head of the wooden stick and straightened up, my ears ringing faintly. Without even wiping it, I plunged the pestle into the bowl, feeling the blanket of salt give way, and the broken cloves of garlic just beneath. The downward thrust of the wooden pestle slowed upon contact, rotated back and forth slowly, and then gently altered its rhythm to include an up and down beat. Back and forth, round, up and down, back, forth, round, round, up and down … There was a heavy fullness at the root of me that was exciting and dangerous.

  As I continued to pound the spice, a vital connection seemed to establish itself between the muscles of my fingers curved tightly around the smooth pestle in its insistent downward motion, and the molten core of my body whose source emanated from a new ripe fullness just beneath the pit of my stomach. That invisible thread, taut and sensitive as a clitoris exposed, stretched through my curled fingers up my round brown arm into the moist reality of my armpits, whose warm sharp odor with a strange new overlay mixed with the ripe garlic smells from the mortar and the general sweat-heavy aromas of high summer.

  The thread ran over my ribs and along my spine, tingling and singing, into a basin that was poised between my hips, now pressed against the low kitchen counter before which I stood, pounding spice. And within that basin was a tiding ocean of blood beginning to be made real and available to me for strength and information.

  The jarring shocks of the velvet-lined pestle, striking the bed of spice, traveled up an invisible pathway along the thread into the center of me, and the harshness of the repeated impacts became increasingly more unbearable. The tidal basin suspended between my hips shuddered at each repetition of the strokes which now felt like assaults. Without my volition my downward thrusts of the pestle grew gentler and gentler, until its velvety surface seemed almost to caress the liquefying mash at the bottom of the mortar.

  The whole rhythm of my movements softened and elongated, until, dreamlike, I stood, one hand tightly curved around the carved mortar, steadying it against the middle of my body; while my other hand, around the pestle, rubbed and pressed the moistening spice into readiness with a sweeping circular movement.

  I hummed tunelessly to myself as I worked in the warm kitchen, thinking with relief about how simple my life would be now that I had become a woman. The catalogue of dire menstruation-warnings from my mother passed out of my head. My body felt strong and full and open, yet captivated by the gentle motions of the pestle, and the rich smells filling the kitchen, and the fullness of the young summer heat.

  I heard my mother’s key in the lock.

  She swept into the kitchen briskly, like a ship under full sail. There were tiny beads of sweat over her upper lip, and vertical creases between her brows.

  ‘You mean to tell me no meat is ready?’ My mother dropped her parcel of tea onto the table, and looking over my shoulder, sucked her teeth loudly in weary disgust. ‘What do you call yourself doing, now? You have all night to stand up there playing with the food? I go all the way to the store and back already and still you can’t mash up a few pieces of garlic to season some meat? But you know how to do the thing better than this! Why you vex me so?’

  She took the mortar and pestle out of my hands and started to grind vigorously. And there were still bits of garlic left at the bottom of the bowl.

  ‘Now you do, so!’ She brought the pestle down inside the bowl of the mortar with dispatch, crushing the last of the garlic. I heard the thump of wood brought down heavily upon wood, and I felt the harsh impact throughout my body, as if something had broken inside of me. Thump, thump, went the pestle, purposefully, up and down in the old familiar way.

  ‘It was getting mashed, Mother,’ I dared to protest, turning away to the icebox. ‘I’ll fetch the meat.’ I was surprised at my own brazenness in answering back.

  But something in my voice interrupted my mother’s efficient motions. She ignored my implied contradiction, itself an act of rebellion strictly forbidden in our house. The thumping stopped.

  ‘What’s wrong with you, now? Are you sick? You want to go to your bed?’

  ‘No, I’m all right, Mother.’

  But I felt her strong fingers on my upper arm, turning me around, her other hand under my chin as she peered into my face. Her voice softened.

  ‘Is it your period making you so slow-down today?’ She gave my chin a little shake, as I looked up into her hooded grey eyes, now becoming almost gentle. The kitchen felt suddenly oppressively hot and still, and I felt myself beginning to shake all over.

  Tears I did not understand started from my eyes, as I realized that my old enjoyment of the bone-jarring way I had been taught to pound spice would feel different to me from now on, and also that in my mother’s kitchen there was only one right way to do anything. Perhaps my life had not become so simple, after all.

  My mother stepped away from the counter and put her heavy arm around my shoulders. I could smell the warm herness rising from between her arm and her body, mixed with the smell of glycerine and rosewater, and the scent of her thick bun of hair.

  ‘I’ll finish up the food for supper.’ She smiled at me, and there was a tenderness in her voice and an absence of annoyance that was welcome, although unfamiliar.

  ‘You come inside now and lie down on the couch and I’ll make you a hot cup of tea.’

  He
r arm across my shoulders was warm and slightly damp. I rested my head upon her shoulder, and realized with a shock of pleasure and surprise that I was almost as tall as my mother, as she led me into the cool darkened parlor.

  12

  At home, my mother said, ‘Remember to be sisters in the presence of strangers.’ She meant white people, like the woman who tried to make me get up and give her my seat on the Number 4 bus, and who smelled like cleaning fluid. At St Catherine’s, they said, ‘Be sisters in the presence of strangers’, and they meant non-catholics. In high school, the girls said, ‘Be sisters in the presence of strangers’, and they meant men. My friends said, ‘Be sisters in the presence of strangers’, and they meant the squares.

  But in high school, my real sisters were strangers; my teachers were racists; and my friends were that color I was never supposed to trust.

  In high school, my best friends were ‘The Branded’, as our sisterhood of rebels sometimes called ourselves. We never talked about those differences that separated us, only the ones that united us against the others. My friends and I talked about who studied german or french, who liked poetry or doing ‘the twist’, who went out with boys, and who was ‘progressive’. We even talked about our position as women in a world supposed to be run by men.

  But we never ever talked about what it meant and felt like to be Black and white, and the effects that had on our being friends. Of course, everybody with any sense deplored racial discrimination, theoretically and without discussion. We could conquer it by ignoring it.

  I had grown up in such an isolated world that it was hard for me to recognize difference as anything other than a threat, because it usually was. (The first time I saw my sister Helen in the tub naked I was almost fourteen, and I thought she was a witch because her nipples were pale pink against her light brown breasts, not deeply purple like mine.) But sometimes, I was close to crazy with believing that there was some secret thing wrong with me personally that formed an invisible barrier between me and the rest of my friends, who were white. What was it that kept people from inviting me to their houses, their parties, their summer homes for a weekend? Was it that their mothers did not like them to have friends, the way my mother didn’t? Did their mothers caution them about never trusting outsiders? But they visited each other. There was something here that I was missing. Since the only place I couldn’t see clearly was behind my own eyes, obviously the trouble was with me. I had no words for racism.

  On the deepest level, I probably knew then what I know now. But it was not serviceable to my child’s mind to understand, and I needed too much to remain a child for a little bit more.

  We were The Branded, the Lunatic Fringe, proud of our out-rageousness and our madness, our bizarre-colored inks and quill pens. We learned how to mock the straight set, and how to cultivate our group paranoia into an instinct for self-protection that always stopped our shenanigans just short of expulsion. We wrote obscure poetry and cherished our strangeness as the spoils of default, and in the process we learned that pain and rejection hurt, but that they weren’t fatal, and that they could be useful since they couldn’t be avoided. We learned that not feeling at all was worse than hurting. At that time, suffering was clearly what we did best. We became The Branded because we learned how to make a virtue out of it.

  How meager the sustenance was I gained from the four years I spent in high school; yet, how important that sustenance was to my survival. Remembering that time is like watching old pictures of myself in a prison camp picking edible scraps out of the garbage heap, and knowing that without that garbage I might have starved to death. The overwhelming racism of so many of the faculty, including the ones upon whom I had my worst schoolgirl crushes. How little I settled for in the way of human contact, compared to what I was conscious of wanting.

  It was in high school that I came to believe that I was different from my white classmates, not because I was Black, but because I was me.

  For four years, Hunter High School was a lifeline. No matter what it was in reality, I got something there I needed. For the first time I met young women my own age, Black and white, who spoke a language I could usually understand and reply within. I met girls with whom I could share feelings and dreams and ideas without fear. I found adults who tolerated my feelings and ideas without punishment for insolence, and even a few who respected and admired them.

  Writing poetry became an ordinary effort, not a secret and rebellious vice. The other girls at Hunter who wrote poetry did not invite me to their homes, either, but they did elect me literary editor of the school arts magazine.

  By my sophomore year in high school, I was in open battle on every other front in my life except school. Relationships with my family had come to resemble nothing so much as a West Indian version of the Second World War. Every conversation with my parents, particularly with my mother, was like a playback of the Battle of the Bulge in Black panorama with stereophonic sound. Blitzkrieg became my favorite symbol for home. I fantasized all my dealings with them against a backdrop of Joan of Arc at Rheims or the Revolutionary War.

  I cleaned my flintlocks nightly, and poured my lead-mold bullets after midnight when everybody else in my family was asleep. I had discovered a new world called voluntary aloneness. After midnight was the only time it was possible in my family’s house. At any other time, a closed door was still considered an insult. My mother viewed any act of separation from her as an indictment of her authority. I was allowed to shut my door to my room only while I was doing my homework and not for a moment longer. My room opened into the living room, and an hour after dinner I could hear my mother calling me.

  ‘What’s that door still closed about? You not finished your homework still?’

  I came to the door of my room. ‘I’m still studying, Mother, I have a geometry test tomorrow.’

  ‘You can’t bring the book and study out here? Look your sister working on the couch.’

  A request for privacy was treated like an outright act of insolence for which the punishment was swift and painful. In my junior year, I was grateful for the advent of television into our house. It gave me an excuse to retreat into my room and close my door for an acceptable reason.

  When I finally went to bed, scenes of violence and mayhem peopled my nightmares like black and white pepper. Frequently I woke to find my pillowcase red and stiffened by gushing nosebleeds during the night, or damp and saturated with the acrid smell of tears and the sweat of terror.

  I unzipped my pillow-covering and washed it by hand surreptitiously every weekend when I changed my bedlinen. I hung it on the back of the radiator in my room to dry. That pillow-covering became a heavy, unbleached muslin record of all the nightly blitzes of my emotional war. Secretly, I rather enjoyed the rank and pungent smells of my pillowcase, even the yeasty yellow stains that were left after my blood was washed away. Unsightly as they were, the stains, like the smells, were evidence of something living, and I so often felt that I had died and wakened up in a hell called home.

  I memorized Edna St Vincent Millay’s poem ‘Renascence’, all eight pages. I said it to myself often. The words were so beautiful they made me happy to hear, but it was the sadness and the pain and the renewal that gave me hope.

  For east and west will pinch the heart

  that cannot keep them pushed apart

  and he whose soul is flat, the sky

  will cave in on him, by and by.

  My mother responded to these changes in me as if I were a foreign hostile.

  I tried confiding in a guidance counselor at school. She was also the head of the english department, who kept telling me that I could do much better work if I tried, and that I could really be a credit to my people.

  ‘Are you having trouble at home, dear?’

  How did she know? Maybe she could help, after all. I poured my heart out to her. I told her all my unhappiness. I told her about my mother’s strictness and meanness and unfairness at home, and how she didn’t love me because I was
bad and I was fat, not neat and well-behaved like my two older sisters. I told Mrs Flouton I wanted to leave home when I was eighteen, or go away to school, but my mother didn’t want me to.

  The sounds of traffic outside the window on Lexington Avenue grew louder. It was 3:30. Mrs Flouton looked at her watch.

  ‘We’ll have to stop now, dear. Why don’t you ask your mother to drop in to see me tomorrow? I’m sure we can fix this little problem.’

  I didn’t know which problem she meant, but her condescending smile was sweet, and it felt good for once to have a grown-up on my side.

  Next day, my mother left the office early and came to Hunter. The night before I had told her Mrs Flouton wanted to see her. She fixed me with a piercing look from out of the corner of her tired eyes.

  ‘Don’t tell me you making trouble again in this school, too?’

  ‘No, Mother, it’s just about going to college.’ Somebody on my side. I sat outside the guidance room door while my mother was inside talking to Mrs Flouton.

  The door opened. My mother sailed out of the office and headed for the school exit without so much as a look at me. Oh boy. Was I going to be allowed to go away to school if I could get a scholarship?

  I caught up with my mother at the door leading to the street.

  ‘What did Mrs Flouton say, Mother? Can I go away to college?’

  Just before the street, my mother finally turned to me, and I saw with a shock that her eyes were red. She had been crying. There was no fury in her voice, only heavy, awful pain. All she said to me before she turned away was, ‘How could you say those things about your mother to that white woman?’

  Mrs Flouton had repeated all of my words to my mother, with a ghoulish satisfaction of detail. Whether it was because she saw my mother as an uppity Black woman refusing her help, or both of us as a sociological experiment not involving human feeling, confidentiality, or common sense, I will never know. This was the same guidance counselor who gave me an aptitude test a year later and told me I should consider becoming a dental technician because I had scored very high on science and manual dexterity.