Zami

by Audre Lorde

  ‘You scared? Don’t be scared, sweetheart,’ she said, picking up the basin with the edge of a towel and moving it onto the other edge of the bed.

  ‘Now just lie back and put your legs up. Nothing to be scared of. Nothing to it – I would do it on my own daughter. Now if you was three, four months, say, it would be harder because it would take longer, see? But you not far gone. Don’t worry. Tonight, tomorrow, maybe, you hurt a little bit, like bad cramps. You get cramps?’

  I nodded, mute, my teeth clenched against the pain. But her hands were busy between my legs as she looked intently at what she was doing.

  ‘You take some aspirin, a little drink. Not too much though. When it’s ready, the tube comes back down and the bleeding comes with it. Then, no more baby. Next time you take better care of yourself, darling.’

  By the time Mrs Muñoz was finished talking she had skillfully passed the long slender catheter through my cervix into my uterus. The pain had been acute but short. It lay coiled inside of me like a cruel benefactor, soon to rupture the delicate lining and wash away my worries in blood.

  Since to me all pain was beyond bearing, even this short bout seemed interminable.

  ‘You see, now, that’s all there is to it. That wasn’t so bad, was it?’ She patted my shuddering thigh reassuringly. ‘All over. Now get dressed. And wear the pad,’ she cautioned, as she pulled off the rubber gloves. ‘You start bleeding in a couple of hours, then you lie down. Here, you want the gloves back?’

  I shook my head, and handed her the money. She thanked me. ‘That’s a special price because you a friend of Anna’s,’ she smiled, helping me on with my coat. ‘By this time tomorrow, it will be all over. If you have any trouble you call me. But no trouble, just a little cramps.’

  I stopped off on West 4th Street and bought a bottle of apricot brandy for eighty-nine cents. It was the day before my eighteenth birthday and I decided to celebrate my relief. Now all I had to do was hurt.

  On the slow Saturday local back to my furnished room in Brighton Beach the cramps began, steadily increasing. Everything’s going to be all right now, I kept saying to myself as I leaned over slightly on the subway seat, if I can just get through the next day. I can do it. She said it was safe. The worst is over, and if anything goes wrong I can always go to the hospital. I’ll tell them I don’t know her name, and I was blindfolded so I couldn’t know where I was.

  I wondered how bad the pain was going to get, and that terrified me more than anything else. I did not think about how I could die from hemorrhage, or a perforated uterus. The terror was only about the pain.

  The subway car was almost empty.

  Just last spring around that same time one Saturday morning, I woke up in my mother’s house to the smell of bacon frying in the kitchen, and the abrupt realization as I opened my eyes that the dream I had been having of giving birth to a baby girl was in fact only a dream. I sat bolt upright in my bed, facing the little window onto the air shaft, and cried and cried and cried from disappointment until my mother came into the room to see what was wrong.

  The train came up out of the tunnel over the bleak edge of south Brooklyn. The Coney Island parachute jump steeple and a huge grey gas storage tank were the only breaks in the leaden skyline.

  I dared myself to feel any regrets.

  That night about 8 P.M., I was lying curled tightly on my bed, trying to distract myself from the stabbing pains in my groin by deciding whether or not I wanted to dye my hair coal black.

  I couldn’t begin to think about the risks I was running. But another piece of me was being amazed at my own daring. I had done it. Even more than my leaving home, this action which was tearing my guts apart and from which I could die except I wasn’t going to – this action was a kind of shift from safety towards self-preservation. It was a choice of pains. That’s what living was all about. I clung to that and tried to feel only proud.

  I had not given in. I had not been merely the eye on the ceiling until it was too late. They hadn’t gotten me.

  There was a tap on the alley door, and I looked out the window. My friend Blossom from school had gotten one of our old high school teachers to drive her out to see if I was ‘okay’, and to bring me a bottle of peach brandy for my birthday. She was one of the people I had consulted, and she had wanted to have nothing to do with an abortion, saying I should have the baby. I didn’t bother to tell her Black babies were not adopted. They were absorbed into families, abandoned, or ‘given up’. But not adopted. Nonetheless I knew she was worried to have come all the way from Queens to Manhattan and then to Brighton Beach.

  I was touched.

  We only talked about inconsequential things. Never a word about what was going on inside of me. Now it was my secret; the only way I could handle it was alone. I sensed they were both grateful that I did.

  ‘You sure you’re going to be okay?’ Bloss asked. I nodded.

  Miss Burman suggested we go for a walk along the boardwalk in the crisp February darkness. There was no moon. The walk helped a little, and so did the brandy. But when we got back to my room, I couldn’t concentrate on their conversation any more. I was too distracted by the rage gnawing at my belly.

  ‘Do you want us to go?’ Bloss asked with her characteristic bluntness. Miss Burman, sympathetic but austere, stood quietly in the doorway looking at my posters. I nodded at Bloss gratefully. Miss Burman lent me five dollars before she left.

  The rest of the night was an agony of padding back and forth along the length of the hallway from my bedroom to the bathroom, doubled over in pain, watching clots of blood fall out of my body into the toilet and wondering if I was all right, after all. I had never seen such huge red blobs come from me before. They scared me. I was afraid I might be bleeding to death in that community bathroom in Brighton Beach in the middle of the night of my eighteenth birthday, with a crazy old lady down the hall muttering restlessly in her sleep. But I was going to be all right. Soon this was all going to be over, and I would be safe.

  I watched one greyish mucous shape disappear in the bowl, wondering if that was the embryo.

  By dawn, when I went to take some more aspirin, the catheter had worked its way out of my body. I was bleeding heavily, very heavily. But my experience in the OB wards told me that I was not hemorrhaging.

  I washed the long stiff catheter and laid it away in a drawer, after examining it carefully. This implement of my salvation was a wicked red, but otherwise innocuous-looking.

  I took an amphetamine in the thin morning sun and wondered if I should spend a quarter on some coffee and a danish. I remembered I was supposed to usher at a Hunter College concert that same afternoon, for which I was to be paid ten dollars, a large sum for an afternoon’s work, and one that would enable me to repay my debts to Ann and Miss Burman.

  I made myself some sweet milky coffee and took a hot bath, even though I was bleeding. After that, the pain dimmed gradually to a dull knocking gripe.

  On a sudden whim, I got up and threw on some clothes and went out into the morning. I took the bus into Coney Island to an early-morning food shop near Nathan’s and had myself a huge birthday breakfast, complete with french fries and an english muffin. I hadn’t had a regular meal in a restaurant for a long time. It cost almost half of Miss Burman’s five dollars, because it was kosher and expensive. And delicious.

  Afterward, I returned home. I lay resting upon my bed, filled with a sense of well-being and relief from pain and terror that was almost euphoric. I really was all right.

  As the morning slipped into afternoon, I realized that I was exhausted. But the thought of making ten dollars for one afternoon’s work got me wearily up and back onto the weekend local train for the long trip to Hunter College.

  By mid-afternoon my legs were quivering. I walked up and down the aisles dully, hardly hearing the string quartet. In the last part of the concert, I went into the ladies room to change my tampax and the pads I was wearing. In the stall, I was seized with a sudden wave of nausea
that bent me double, and I promptly and with great force lost my $2.50-with-tip Coney Island breakfast, which I had never digested. Weakened and shivering, I sat on the stool, my head against the wall. A fit of renewed cramps swept through me so sharply that I moaned softly.

  Miz Lewis, the Black ladies-room attendant who had known me from the bathrooms of Hunter High School, was in the back of the room in her cubby, and she had seen me come into the otherwise empty washroom.

  ‘Is that you, Autray, moaning like that? You all right?’ I saw her low-shoed feet stop outside my stall.

  ‘Yes ma’am,’ I gasped through the door, cursing my luck to have walked into that particular bathroom. ‘It’s just my period.’

  I steadied myself, and arranged my clothes. When I finally stepped out, bravely and with my head high, Miz Lewis was still standing outside, her arms folded.

  She had always maintained a steady but impersonal interest in the lives of the few Black girls at the high school, and she was a familiar face which I was glad to see when I met her in the washroom of the college in the autumn. I told her I was going to the college now, and that I had left home. Miz Lewis had raised her eyebrows and pursed her lips, shaking her grey head. ‘You girls sure are somethin’!’ she’d said.

  In the uncompromising harshness of the fluorescent lights, Miz Lewis gazed at me intently through her proper gold spectacles, which perched upon her broad brown nose like round antennae.

  ‘Girl, you sure you all right? Don’t sound all right to me.’ She peered up into my face. ‘Sit down here a minute. You just started? You white like some other people’s child.’

  I took her seat gratefully. ‘I’m all right, Miz Lewis,’ I protested. ‘I just have bad cramps, that’s all.’

  ‘Jus’ cramps? That bad? Then why you come here like that today for? You ought to be home in bed, the way your eyes looking. You want some coffee, honey?’ She offered me her cup.

  ‘Cause I need the money, Miz Lewis. I’ll be all right; I really will.’ I shook my head to the coffee, and stood up. Another cramp slid up from my clenched thighs and rammed into the small of my back, but I only rested my head against the edge of the stalls. Then, taking a paper towel from the stack on the glass shelf in front of me, I wet it and wiped the cold sweat from my forehead. I wiped the rest of my face, and blotted my faded lipstick carefully. I grinned at my reflection in the mirror and at Miz Lewis standing to the side behind me, her arms still folded against her broad short-waisted bosom. She sucked her teeth with a sharp intake of breath and sighed a long sigh.

  ‘Chile, why don’t you go on back home to your mama, where you belong?’

  I almost burst into tears. I felt like screaming, drowning out her plaintive, kindly, old-woman’s voice that kept pretending everything was so simple.

  ‘Don’t you think she’s worrying about you? Do she know you in all this trouble?’

  ‘I’m not in trouble, Miz Lewis. I just don’t feel well because of my period.’ Turning away, I crumpled up the used towel and dropped it into the basket, and then sat down again, heavily. My legs were shockingly weak.

  ‘Yeah. Well.’ Miz Lewis sucked her teeth again, and put her hand into her apron pocket. ‘Here,’ she said, pulling four dollars out of her purse. ‘You take these and get yourself a taxi home.’ She knew I lived in Brooklyn. ‘And you go right home, now. I’ll cross your name off the list downstairs for you. And you can pay me back when you get it.’

  I took the crumpled bills from her dark, work-wise hands. ‘Thanks a lot, Miz Lewis,’ I said gratefully. I stood up again, this time a little more steadily. ‘But don’t you worry about me, this won’t last very long.’ I walked shakily to the door.

  ‘And you put your feet up, and a cold compress on your tummy, and you stay in bed for a few days, too,’ she called after me, as I made my way to the elevators to the main floor.

  I asked the cab to take me around to the alley entrance, instead of getting out on Brighton Beach Avenue. I was afraid my legs might not take me where I wanted to go. I wondered if I had almost fainted.

  Once indoors, I took three aspirin and slept for twenty-four hours.

  When I awoke Monday afternoon, the bed-sheets were stained, but my bleeding had slowed to normal and the cramps were gone.

  I wondered if I had gotten some bad food at the foodshop Sunday morning that had made me sick. Usually I never got upset stomachs, and prided myself on my cast-iron digestion. The following day I went back to school.

  On Friday, after classes, before I went to work, I picked up my money for ushering. I sought out Miz Lewis in the auditorium washroom and paid her back her four dollars.

  ‘Oh, thank you, Autray,’ she said, looking a little surprised. She folded the bills up neatly and tucked them back into the green snap-purse she kept in her uniform apron pocket. ‘How you feeling?’

  ‘Fine, Miz Lewis,’ I said jauntily. ‘I told you I was going to be all right.’

  ‘You did not! You said you was all right and I knew you wasn’t, so don’t tell me none of that stuff, I don’t want to hear.’ Miz Lewis eyed me balefully.

  ‘You gon’ back home to your mama, yet?’

  16

  My apartment on Spring Street was not exactly an enchanted palace, but it was my first real apartment and it was all my own. Iris’s apartment on Rivington Street was a brief stopover after the trauma of declaring myself independent. The place in Brighton Beach was, after all, only a large furnished room with cooking privileges. But Spring Street was really my own, even though it was on a sublet from a friend of Jean’s who was in Paris for a year. He had left a very complicated hi-fi hookup, a wooden rocking horse, and unbelievable filth encrusting everything in the kitchen. Otherwise, there wasn’t much else except dirty linoleum in every room and ashes in a fireplace which was the only source of heat for the whole little three-room apartment. But the rent was only ten dollars a month.

  I moved in two weeks after the abortion. Since I was physically fine and healthy, it didn’t occur to me that I wasn’t totally free from any aftermath of that grueling affair. But the months between that birthday weekend in February and the first stirring smells of spring in the air, as I took a train to Bennington for a weekend, are very much a blur. I was visiting Jill, one of The Branded.

  I came home from school and my part-time job, to sometimes sit on the edge of my boxspring bed in the center room, still with my coat on, and would suddenly realize that it was the next morning, and I had not taken off my coat yet, much less put away the container of milk I had bought for the cat I had found to join me in my misery.

  The house was the only thing I had that belonged to me, and the cat I got from the neighborhood grocery store, and two Javanese temple birds in a little cage that Martha and Judy had brought me as a housewarming gift. They were still seniors in high school, and had appeared one Sunday afternoon with the birds and a bottle of apricot brandy and four strong young willing arms. After we hung some curtains on the tall narrow windows of the front room, which faced the back windows of the tenement in front, the three of us sat on my couch before the fireplace, contemplating ripping off the cracking plaster above the fireplace to expose the beautiful old red brick of the firewall just beneath. We sat, listening to the indignant caw of the temple lovebirds, and Rachmaninoff on the record player, and drinking apricot brandy in the chill. Later that evening we built a fire in the fireplace, and I knocked over the bottle of brandy or Martha did, because she was always doing things like that and then apologizing profusely. So we all made a lark of it and fantasized about digging through the softwood boards to see if we could find clean wood for apricot-brandy-flavored toothpicks.

  But that’s the only day I can recall between moving in and the first of summer. Yet I went to school, and passed all my subjects that term. I also went uptown every Thursday night to meetings of the Harlem Writers Guild.

  The apartment was very small, and it is shocking to think of any more than one person living there, but of course a w
hole family had once lived in these three tiny rooms. The building faced a narrow courtyard separating its three stories from the main tenement, which was six stories high.

  In the front room was the fireplace, and the main door of the flat. The center room was even smaller, with no windows at all and just enough space for a double bed, a thin chest of drawers, and the door to the kitchen, which had a sink, stove, refrigerator, and bathtub. There was another door leading to the outside hall, but it was bolted shut. This kind of apartment was called a floor-through. There was no hot water at all in the building, which had six apartments in it, two on each floor. The toilets were in the outside halls, one to a story, every two apartments. Ralph, my next-door neighbor, and I put a padlock on ours to keep the Bowery bums from coming upstairs and using it.

  I scrubbed the apartment as best as I could, not quite believing the dirt that the former owner had allowed to accumulate. I got rid of what was possible, and resolved to ignore what I couldn’t erase. The kitchen was the worst, so I concentrated on making the two other rooms my own.

  I moved in my bookcase and my books and records, my guitar and my portable typewriter, and it seemed like I was acquiring an awful lot of things, including a little electric space-heater.

  The two big purchases were a boxspring and mattress on sale, with two plushy feather pillows. Sheets and pillow-cases I had from Brighton Beach. I also bought another woolen blanket on Orchard Street. It was a bright red and white Indian-design blanket, warm and fuzzy, and it seemed to heat up the cold, dark bedroom.

  I could seldom bring myself to use the kitchen, except to boil water. It was mostly a place to store the refrigerator, in which I kept whatever little food I did not bring home already fixed. I do remember making chicken-foot stew for Jean and Alf one Saturday night. I got very thin, for me.

  When summer came, The Branded descended upon Spring Street one weekend and scrubbed and scoured. After that, I cooked more often.

  I tore down the plaster wall around and over the fireplace and hand-sanded the old brick until it was rich and smooth and even. I hung Gennie’s guitar over the fireplace, a little to one side.