by Audre Lorde
Days later, I sat on the low bench beside Louisa’s window, newly opened after its end-of-winter untaping. It was an early spring afternoon. The season had begun unusually warm. The street outside was runny with old rain, the still slick pavement reflecting oily rainbows.
Louisa perched upon her window ledge. One high hip nudged against the wooden window frame, her stockinged leg moving back and forth ever so slightly. The other drooped down over the edge of the bench where I was sitting.
‘You and Gene were such good friends.’ Louisa’s tones were clipped and longing. ‘Matter of fact, she saw you more than …’ she fingered the spirals of Gennie’s notebook which I had just given her, keeping the diary for myself. Louisa’s eyes were dry and desperately conversational. I suddenly remembered Gennie saying her mother had once been a schoolteacher down south and prided herself on proper speech. ‘… than she saw anybody else.’ Louisa finished abruptly. I savored this piece of information in silence. Gennie’s best friend. ‘You looked enough alike to be sisters, people said.’ Except Gennie was lighter and thinner and beautiful.
Something about Louisa’s eyes warned me and I stood up quickly. ‘I gotta go, Miz Thompson, my mother …’ I reached for my coat on the couch. It had once been Louisa’s daybed, the one where Gennie and I lay laughing and talking and smoking. When Gennie left, Louisa had redone the tiny apartment and taken over the bedroom. I suddenly saw again Gennie’s scratched face and tired eyes as she snapped at me that night, ‘I can’t go back, there’s no room for me anymore … I can’t talk to my mother about Phillip …’
I buttoned my coat hurriedly. ‘She’s waiting for me to go marketing, because my sisters have a rehearsal at school.’ But swift-moving Louisa caught me, one hand on my arm, before I could open the door.
Louisa took off her rimless glasses and she did not look like anybody’s mother at all. She looked too young, and too pretty, and too tired, and her red-rimmed eyes were full of tears and pleading. She was thirty-four years old and tomorrow we were going to bury her only child, a sixteen-year old suicide.
‘You-all were best friends,’ insistent, less proper, her fingers tight through my coat sleeve. ‘Do you know why she did it?’
Louisa had a mole on her face beside her nose, almost exactly the same place as Gennie’s had been. It was magnified by the tears rolling down her cheeks. I looked away, my hand still on the doorknob.
‘No, ma’am.’ I looked up, again. I remembered my mother’s words, resisting them, ‘That man call himself father was using that girl for I don’t know what.’
‘I have to go now.’
I opened the door, stepped over the floor-anchored metal rod upon which I had tripped so many times before, and closed the door behind me. I heard the metallic clang of the police lock rod as it slid back into place, mingled with the muffled sounds of Louisa’s sobbing.
Gennie was buried in Woodlawn Cemetery on the first day of April. The Amsterdam News story about her death announced that she was not pregnant and so no reason for her suicide could be established. Nothing else.
The sound of dirt clods flying hollow against the white coffin. The sound of birds who knew death as no reason for silence. A black-clad man mouthing words in a foreign tongue. No hallowed ground for suicides. The sound of weeping women. The wind. The forward edge of spring. The sound of grass growing, flowers beginning to blossom, the branching of a far-off tree. Clods against the white coffin.
We drove away from the grave, down a winding hill. The last thing I saw of that place was two large gravemen with unshaven faces pulling the lowering straps from the grave. They tossed the still living flowers into a waiting bin, and shoveled earth into the grave. Two grave-hands, putting the finishing touches on a raw mound of earth, outlined against the suddenly grey and lowering April sky.
15
Two weeks after I graduated from high school, I moved out of my parents’ home. I hadn’t planned it that way; that’s just the way it worked out. I went to stay with a friend of Jean’s who had her own apartment on the Lower East Side, on Rivington Street.
I worked at Beth David hospital nights as a nurses’ aide, and had an affair with a boy named Peter.
I met Peter at a Labor Youth League party in February and we made a date. He arrived to take me to the movies the next afternoon. It was Washington’s Birthday, and both of my parents were home. My father answered the door, and would not let Peter into the house because he was white. That immediately catapulted what would have been a passing teenage fancy into a revolutionary cause célèbre.
The precipitating factors in my leaving home were some disparaging remarks my father made about Gennie, now dead almost two years, and a fight with my sister Helen. My mother threatened to call the police and I left. I went to work, returned home after my family was asleep, and packed. What I couldn’t carry I dumped into a sheet and dragged down the street and left at the foot of the steps of the police station. I took my clothes, some books, and Gennie’s guitar and went to Iris’s house. The next day I hailed a man on the street with a pickup truck and paid him five dollars to come uptown with me and get my bookcase out of my family’s house. Nobody was home. I left a cryptic note on the kitchen table which read, ‘I am moving out. Since the causes are obvious, the results are well-known.’ I think I meant it the other way around, but I was very excited and very scared.
I was seventeen years old.
When I moved out of my mother’s house, shaky and determined, I began to fashion some different relationship to this country of our sojourn. I began to seek some more fruitful return than simple bitterness from this place of my mother’s exile, whose streets I came to learn better than my mother had ever learned them. But thanks to what she did know and could teach me, I survived in them better than I could have imagined. I made an adolescent’s wild and powerful commitment to battling in my own full eye, closer to my own strength, which was after all not so very different from my mother’s. And there I found other women who sustained me and from whom I learned other loving. How to cook the foods I had never tasted in my mother’s house. How to drive a stick-shift car. How to loosen up and not be lost.
Their shapes join Linda and Gran’Ma Liz and Gran’Aunt Anni in my dreaming, where they dance with swords in their hands, stately forceful steps, to mark the time when they were all warriors.
In libation, I wet the ground to my old heads.
I spent the summer feeling free and in love, I thought. I was also hurting. No one had even tried to find me. I had forgotten at whose knee I learned my pride. Peter and I saw each other a lot, and slept together, since it was expected.
Sex seemed pretty dismal and frightening and a little demeaning, but Peter said I’d get used to it, and Iris said I’d get used to it, and Jean said I’d get used to it, and I used to wonder why it wasn’t possible to just love each other and be warm and close and let the grunting go.
In September I moved to my own place out in Brighton Beach. The Branded and I had found the room at the beginning of the summer, but it was occupied. The landlady said it could be rented all winter for twenty-five dollars a month. Since I was only making a hundred dollars plus one meal a day at the hospital, I couldn’t afford any more.
My landlady’s name was Gussie Faber. Her brother offered to help me move my stuff from Iris’s house. When it was all moved in and Mrs Faber had gone upstairs, her brother closed the door to my room and said I was a nice girl and I wouldn’t have to pay him for moving me if I’d just be quiet and stand still for a minute.
I thought it was all pretty stupid, and he got cum all over the back of my dungarees.
It was a single large room with the use of a community bath and a kitchen down the hall. I shared both of them with a permanent tenant, an old woman whose children paid rent for her not to live with them. At night she would talk to herself aloud, crying because her children were making her live with a schwartze. I could hear her through the common wall adjoining our very common kitchen. By day, she
sat at the kitchen table and drank my soda while I was away at work and school.
When college started, Peter and I broke up. I hadn’t known really why it had begun, and I didn’t know why it ended. One day Peter just said we should probably stop seeing each other for a while, and I agreed, thinking that must be the thing to do.
The rest of the autumn was an agony of loneliness, long subway rides, and not enough sleep. I worked forty-four hours a week at the hospital and went to school for fifteen more. I traveled three hours a day to and from Brighton Beach. That left half-day Saturday and all day Sunday to cry over Peter’s silence and to wonder if my mother was missing me. I couldn’t study.
Near the end of November I simply stayed in bed for three days, and when I got up I found I had lost my job at the hospital.
Being out of work brought a lot of new and starkly instructive experiences. It meant pawning my typewriter, which gave me nightmares, and selling my blood, which gave me chills.
Coming out of the bloodbank on the Bowery and Houston Street, clutching my five dollars, I had an image of myself adjusting the transfusion tube over a patient while I worked at Beth David. Into whose veins would my blood soon be flowing? And what would that person then become to me? What kind of relationship was established by the selling of blood, one to another?
Most of all, being out of work meant drinking hot water, free in the college cafeteria, and the grinding annihilation of employment agencies and the personnel clerks who grinned at my presumption in applying for jobs as a medical receptionist, and part-time at that. (I had ten dollars a week from a scholarship, most of which went towards my rent.)
Just before Christmas, I got a job through college, working afternoons for a doctor. That provided me with money to get my typewriter out of hock, and a little more time to be depressed. I took long walks along the winter beach. Coney Island was a mile away, and now that the concessions were closed, the boardwalk was a lovely quiet that matched my need. I could not go to the movies, even though I loved the pictures, because all around were people in couples and groups, and they underlined my solitary state until I felt my heart would break if I were any more alone.
One night I couldn’t sleep, I walked down to the beach. The moon was full, and the tide was coming in. On the crest of every little wave, instead of whitecaps, was a fluorescent crown. The joining line of sea and sky was veiled; angles of green flame rode the night, line upon line, until the whole darkness was alight with brilliant scallops of phosphorescence, moving rhythmically in toward shore upon the waves.
Nothing I did could stop them, nor bring them back again.
That was the first Christmas I ever spent alone. I stayed in bed all day long. I could hear the old lady next door vomiting into her basin. I had put nux vomica into a bottle of my cream soda.
That night, Peter called, and I saw him again during the next week. We made arrangements to go away for the New Year’s Eve weekend to a furriers union camp. I was to meet him at the Port Authority bus station after I finished work. I was excited; I had never been to the camp before.
I brought my boots and my jeans and my knapsack to work with me, together with a sleeping bag I had borrowed from Iris. I changed in Dr Sutter’s back office, and arrived at the bus station at 7:30. Peter was due at 8:00 and our bus left at 8:45. He never showed up.
By 9:30 I realized he wasn’t going to show up. The bus station was warm and I just sat there for another hour or so, too stunned and tired to move. At last, I gathered up my belongings and started to trudge across town to the BMT subway. The holiday crowd was already beginning to form, and the festivities and horn-blowing to welcome in the New Year were already beginning. I walked through Times Square in my jeans and my jackboots and my lumber jacket, carrying my knapsack and sleeping bag, and the tears rolled down my face as I made my way through the crowds and the slush. I could not quite believe this was all happening to me.
He called me a few days later with an explanation and I hung up on him immediately, in self-protection. I wanted to pretend he had never existed and that I had never been someone who could be treated so. I would never let anyone treat me like that again.
Two weeks later I discovered I was pregnant.
I tried to recall half-remembered information garnered from other people’s friends who had been ‘in trouble’. The doctor in Pennsylvania who did good clean abortions very cheaply because his daughter had died on a kitchen table after he had refused to abort her. But sometimes the police grew suspicious, so he wasn’t always working. A call through the grapevine found out that he wasn’t.
Trapped. Something – anything – had to be done. No one else can take care of this. What am I going to do?
The doctor who gave me the results of my positive rabbit test was a friend of Jean’s aunt, who had said he might ‘help’. This help meant offering to get me into a home for unwed mothers out of the city run by a friend of his. ‘Anything else,’ he said, piously, ‘is illegal.’
I was terrified by the stories I had heard in school and from my friends about the butchers and the abortion mills of the Daily News. Cheap kitchen table abortions. Jean’s friend Francie had died on the way to the hospital just last year after trying to do it with the handle of a number 1 paintbrush.
These horrors were not just stories, nor infrequent. I had seen too many of the results of botched abortions on the bloody gurneys lining the hallways outside the emergency room.
Besides, I had no real contacts.
Through winter-dim streets, I walked to the subway from the doctor’s office, knowing I could not have a baby and knowing it with a certainty that galvanized me far beyond anything I knew to do.
The girl in the Labor Youth League who had introduced me to Peter had had an abortion, but it had cost three hundred dollars. The guy had paid for it. I did not have three hundred dollars, and I had no way of getting three hundred dollars, and I swore her to secrecy telling her the baby wasn’t Peter’s. Whatever was going to be done I had to do. And fast.
Castor oil and a dozen bromo quinine pills didn’t help.
Mustard baths gave me a rash, but didn’t help either.
Neither did jumping off a table in an empty classroom at Hunter, and I almost broke my glasses.
Ann was a licensed practical nurse I knew from working the evening shift at Beth David Hospital. We used to flirt in the nurses’ pantry after midnight when the head nurse was sneaking a doze in some vacant private room on the floor. Ann’s husband was a soldier in Korea. She was thirty-one years old – and knew her way around, in her own words – beautiful and friendly, small, sturdy, and deeply Black. One night, while we were warming the alcohol and talcum for p.m. care backrubs, she pulled out her right breast to show me the dark mole which grew at the very line where her deep-purple aureola met the lighter chocolate brown of her skin, and which, she told me with a mellow laugh, ‘drove all the doctors crazy’.
Ann had introduced me to amphetamine samples on those long sleepy night shifts, and we crashed afterward at her bright kitchenette apartment on Cathedral Parkway, drinking black coffee and gossiping until dawn about the strange habits of head nurses, among other things.
I called Ann at the hospital and met her after work one night. I told her I was pregnant.
‘I thought you was gay!’
I heard the disappointed half-question in Ann’s voice, and remembered suddenly our little scene in the nurses’ pantry. But my experience with people who tried to label me was that they usually did it to either dismiss me or use me. I hadn’t even acknowledged my own sexuality yet, much less made any choices about it. I let the remark lay where Jesus flang it.
I asked Ann to get me some ergotrate from the pharmacy, a drug which I had heard from nurses’ talk could be used to encourage bleeding.
‘Are you crazy?’ she said in horror. ‘You can’t mess around with that stuff, girl; it could kill you. It causes hemorrhaging. Let me see what I can find out for you.’
Everybody
knows somebody, Ann said. For her, it was the mother of another nurse in surgery. Very safe and clean, fool-proof and cheap, she said. An induced miscarriage by Foley catheter. A homemade abortion. The narrow hard-rubber tube, used in post-operative cases to keep various body canals open, softened when sterilized. When passed through the cervix into the uterus while soft, it coiled, all fifteen inches, neatly into the womb. Once hardened, its angular turns ruptured the bloody lining and began the uterine contractions that eventually expelled the implanted fetus, along with the membrane. If it wasn’t expelled too soon. If it did not also puncture the uterus.
The process took about fifteen hours and cost forty dollars, which was a week and a half’s pay.
I walked over to Mrs Muñoz’ apartment after I had finished work at Dr Sutter’s office that afternoon. The January thaw was past, and even though it was only 1:00 P.M., the sun had no warmth. The winter grey of mid-February and the darker patches of dirty Upper-East-Side snow. Against my peacoat in the wind I carried a bag containing the fresh pair of rubber gloves and the new bright-red catheter Ann had taken from the hospital for me, and a sanitary pad. I had most of the contents of my last pay envelope, plus the five dollars Ann had lent me.
‘Darling, take off your skirt and panties now while I boil this.’ Mrs Muñoz took the catheter from the bag and poured boiling water from a kettle over it and into a shallow basin. I sat curled around myself on the edge of her broad bed, embarrassed by my half-nakedness before this stranger. She pulled on the thin rubber gloves, and setting the basin upon the table, looked over to where I was perched in the corner of the neat, shabby room.
‘Lie down, lie down. You scared, huh?’ She eyed me from under the clean white kerchief that completely covered her small head. I could not see her hair, and could not tell from her sharp featured, bright-eyed face how old she was, but she looked so young it surprised me that she could have a daughter old enough to be a nurse.
