Zami

by Audre Lorde

  Summer came down with a vengeance into the tiny backyard tenement, and the two windows in the apartment gave no relief. I began to learn how to lay back and enjoy heat, how not to fight it, to open up my pores and let the heat in and the sweat out.

  I used to sit in my underpants and a half-slip and type on a card-table in the living room, at 3:00 A.M. in the morning, with the sweat pouring down the front of me and between my breasts. The lovebirds were now dead, and the cat had run away after he killed them. Writing was the only thing that made me feel like I was alive.

  I never reread what I was writing. They were strange poems of death, destruction, and deep despair. When I went to the Harlem Writers’ Quarterly meetings, I only read old poems from my high school days, a whole year before.

  I came from the valley

  laughing with blackness

  up between the mouth of the mountains I rose

  weeping, cold

  hampered by the clinging souls of dead men

  shaken

  with reverberations of wasted minutes

  unborn years .…….

  ……………………

  I was the story of a phantom people

  I was the hope of lives never lived

  I was a thought-product of the emptiness of space

  and the space in the empty bread baskets

  I was the hand, reaching toward the sun

  the burnt crisp that sought relief …

  .………………………….

  And on the tree of mourning they hanged me

  the lost emotion of an angry people

  hanged me, forgetting how long I was

  in dying

  how deathlessly I stood

  forgetting how easily

  I could rise

  again.

  April 20, 1952

  17

  When I found out that I had failed german and trig in summer school that year, it never occurred to me to think it was because I had spent the summer wetnursing the girls of The Branded in my tiny tenement apartment.

  It never occurred to me that it was because every evening when I came home from work, instead of doing the assignments for my classes the next day, I was serving us coffee and cinnamon ice cubes in powdered milk with dexedrine chasers. We were all poor and ravenous. We sat around on the tiny living-room floor with the now dead fireplace and the two tall windows open, trying to catch a breath of air as we sprawled on the mattress pulled out of the bedroom. Our only coverings were nylon half-slips pulled up over our breasts, sometimes with a sash tied around.

  I told myself I had failed in summer school because I just could not learn german. Some people can, I decided, and some people can’t; and I couldn’t.

  Besides, I was very bored and disappointed with Hunter College, which seemed to me like an extension of a catholic girls school and not at all like Hunter High School, peopled as it had been with our exciting and emotionally complicated lives. For most of the women I met in my freshman classes at Hunter College, an emotional complication meant cutting class to play bridge in the college cafeteria.

  I was also beside myself with sexual frustration, given the presence of all the beautiful young women whom I was sheltering like a wounded banshee. The abortion had left me with an additional sadness about which I could not speak, certainly not to these girls who saw my house and my independence as a refuge, and seemed to think that I was settled and strong and dependable, which, of course, was exactly what I wanted them to think.

  Whether or not they were sleeping with each other on my Bloom & Krup double boxspring with mattress while I was at school and work, I did not know. We joked about it often enough, but if they were, they did not tell me, and I never mentioned how enticing and frightening I found their strange blonde- and red- and chestnut-colored secrets that peeked out from beneath their pulled-up half-slips, in the hundred-degree heat of the small backyard apartment.

  That summer I decided that I was definitely going to have an affair with a woman – in just those words. How I was going to accomplish that, I had no idea, or even what I meant by an affair. But I knew I meant more than cuddling under the covers and kissing in Marie’s bed.

  Marie, like me, had been on the fringes of The Branded in high school. She was short and round, with immense Mediterranean eyes shining out of a heart-shaped face. We shared a passionate weakness for memorizing the same romantic ballads, and for reciting Millay. Marie did not want to go to college, and got a job after high school which gave her nominal independence, even though she still lived with her very strict Italian family.

  I went to dinner a few times at their house, the fall after I left home. The food was plentiful and filling, served by Marie’s silently generous mother who did not approve of me at all, mostly because I was Black, but also because I now lived alone. No nice girl left her mother’s house before she was married, unless she had become a whore, which in Mrs Madrona’s eyes was synonymous with being Black anyway.

  Sometimes I would sleep over, and get to share Marie’s Castro Convertible in the living room, because her brother had the second bedroom. We lay awake far into the night, snuggling under the covers by the light of the votive candle on Our Lady’s altar in the corner, kissing and hugging and giggling in low tones so her mother wouldn’t hear us.

  When the other members of The Branded came back from their various ivy-league colleges in the late spring, we all had the grand reunion/clean-up party at my apartment.

  All except Marie. She had run away from home and moved into the YWCA, and then married someone who sat down at her table in the Waldorf Cafeteria. The same night. They drove into Maryland and found a justice of the peace.

  I opened my house to The Branded and they saw it as a second home. Since it was summer, none of us minded too much that there was no heat or hot water in the apartment, although not having a shower was a problem.

  Sometimes my next-door neighbor and I would go to his friend’s apartment around the corner and have a hot shower.

  There was a constant stream of young women in and out of my apartment, most of them in varying periods and conditions of distress. I particularly remember Bobbi, who lived around the corner and had been a year behind us in high school. She was now in her senior year, and was always being beaten by her mother. Bobbi decided to run away to California even though she had not yet finished school. In those days, that was an unusually bizarre and courageous thing to do, and she hid out at my apartment until her plane left. We all thought she was very daring, even if she was also very young and silly.

  Luckily, Bobbi and her equally silly boyfriend had already left when the FBI came to my house looking for her.

  This was 1952, the height of the McCarthy era, and I knew enough not to let them past my door. They stood outside, stupid and male and proper and blonde and only a little bit threatening in their buttoned-down shirts and striped ties. One had a crew cut, the other’s hair was center-parted and slicked down.

  All of my friends knew we were a menace to the status quo, and defined our rebellions as such. Scientists had broken the code of Linear B, enabling them to read ancient Minoan script. The day before the FBI agents stood in my doorway, Eva Perón had died in Argentina. But somehow we were a threat to the civilized world.

  One day Marie came through my door with her new husband. I didn’t like him at all, so although I was very fond of Marie I was glad to send them on their way. He had liquor on his breath and a nasty smile and some very bizarre sexual appetites that Marie whispered to me about while he was out buying more whiskey. My heart hurt to think of her with him, but she insisted he loved her. I couldn’t understand how, but I took her word for it.

  It was just as well, because two days later her mother showed up on my doorstep with a fresh contingent of FBI men, indistinguishable from the last. The economy was still in recession; there were few jobs around for veterans. White college students were obsessed with security and pensions, and there seemed to be a never-endin
g supply of slightly stupid-looking, slightly menacing, blonde, blue-eyed gumshoes available in 1952.

  Marie’s mother was hysterical and I knew Ralph, my friendly pacifist, slept during the day, so I let them inside the door this time. My cousin, Gerry, was asleep in the inner bedroom and his shoes and pants were in plain view on the couch. I could tell it didn’t make a very good impression on either the FBI men or on Marie’s momma. Young girls did not live alone unless they were whores, and here was the evidence slung across my couch. I paid no attention. It was obvious that the lump in my bed was a single one, and it didn’t too much matter what Marie’s mother called me.

  Marie and Jim, her husband, were not in my house, and that was all the FBI legitimately could ask. I breathed a sigh of relief as I closed the door behind them. Before they left, they told me that Jim was wanted on a white-slavery charge in Texas, for transporting under-aged girls across state lines for purposes of prostitution.

  I was so shaken up by this exchange that I woke Gerry up, and he persuaded me to go with him to an air-conditioned movie.

  It was one of The Branded, Lori, who told me about the many jobs to be had in the factories of Stamford, Connecticut. The idea of leaving New York for a while, with its emotional complications, felt good to me, and the idea of plentiful jobs was particularly appealing. I had decided to leave college, since I couldn’t learn german.

  I put a combination padlock on the door of my apartment, giving the combination to The Branded, who would soon be returning to college. I packed my few clothes, some of my books and records, took my portable typewriter and moved to Stamford.

  I had sixty-three dollars in my pocket.

  I arrived in Stamford on the New Haven local on Thursday afternoon. I went to the Black Community Center whose address I had gotten from a previous visit the week before. From there, I got the address of someone who had a room to rent. I rented the room, which was a shockingly high eight dollars a week, stored my gear, and said goodbye to Martha, who had come up with me to help carry all my portable possessions. The next morning, I got a job at the ribbon factory where Lori had worked during the summer. I was to begin the following Monday morning.

  My room was very tiny, and I shared the bathroom with two other women who also rented rooms in the private house. There were no cooking facilities, so I sneaked in a hotplate to warm up the cans of soup which became my standard evening meal.

  That weekend I walked around Stamford, trying to get a feel of the place. I had never lived in a small town before, nor anywhere other than New York. The Liggett’s Drugstore on Atlantic Avenue, the main thoroughfare, did not know what an egg cream was. They also called soda, pop. Walking down Atlantic Avenue to the railroad station and back, across the little bridge over the Rippowam River which separated East from West Main Street and the Black from the white communities, I marveled at the different scale life seemed to move on here.

  On a Saturday afternoon, the streets seemed strangely uncrowded and unhurried. As I looked into the little dingy stores along the lower end of Atlantic near the station, I wondered why, if they had so much business, they all looked so poor and dull. I didn’t realize for a few weeks why Saturday was not the shopping day that it was in New York.

  I decided that weekend that I was going to work in Stamford, save money, and go to Mexico.

  I could do that, I thought, by conserving on food, which would be no big thing since I couldn’t cook in my room, anyway. I found a supermarket and bought five cans of Mooseabec sardines, a loaf of bread, and five cans of Campbell’s pepperpot soup, my alltime favorite. I figured I was set for the week, a sandwich for lunch, and a can of soup for dinner. I would treat myself on the weekend, I decided, with franks or chicken-foot stew.

  On Monday I started work, at 8:00 in the morning. I could walk to work in a half-hour from where I lived. I sat at a long table with other women, running a hand-cranked hanking machine which made up ribbon into gaily turned hanks and clipped them with a tiny band of metal. The work was unbelievably boring, but the colors of the ribbons were bright and cheerful, and the table by lunchtime looked like a Christmas tree. This was September, but the factory was working on Christmas orders. It took me a while to get the hang of the machine, and how to turn neat hanks that were not returned by the foreman with a sneer. The woman I worked next to consoled me.

  ‘Don’t worry, honey. In three weeks he’ll let you alone.’

  Stamford was a closed-shop town, and workers had to join the union within three weeks of beginning work. When I started, I was paid ninety cents an hour, which would increase to $1.15, the standard minimum wage, when I joined the union. My co-worker knew something I did not. It was standard procedure in most of the ‘software’ factories to hire Black workers for three weeks, then fire them before they could join the union, and hire new workers. The work was not hard to learn. So three weeks later, I found myself with my first paycheck and no job.

  That autumn I began to write poems again, after months of silence. My weekend nights became noisy with the limping clatter of my battered portable typewriter. The woman next door mildly suggested, when we passed on the outside stairs, that silence after midnight was the usual house rule for radios and typewriters. I folded up my blanket and used it as a pad to deaden the sound, as I worked away at the machine, perched upon my rickety table wedged in between my contraband hotplate and the two neat stacks of Mooseabec sardines and Campbell’s soup cans.

  In the soft September evenings of this new place, it was as if Gennie had come alive again. I found myself on Saturday nights, walking through unfamiliar streets, explaining to Gennie in an undertone which streets were which, what the plant was like, and discussing with her the strange mannerisms of these non-New Yorkers.

  And you did not come back to April

  though spring was a powerful lure

  but bided your time in silence

  knowing the dead must endure.

  And you came not again to summer

  nor till the green oaks were leaving

  traces of blood in the autumn

  and there were hours for grieving.

  Gennie was the only companion with whom I shared those first few weeks in Stamford, and sometimes, for days at a time, she was the only person to whom I spoke.

  18

  It was 10:00 A.M. on a crispy Monday morning, and the West Main Community Center was almost empty. I stared straight ahead of me as I sat, waiting for Mrs Kelly to finish. Starched and cocoa-brown, every iron-grey curl in place, she studied my application through gold-rimmed glasses. Across the lobby a printed white sign hung in front of the bronze name plaque on the wall. CRISPUS ATTUCKS CENTER, the sign read. Some local dignitary, no doubt.

  I turned as Mrs Kelly sighed and looked up. ‘And what can we do for you today, young lady?’ She smiled at me, her voice kindly and mama-soft, but I could tell from her eyes that she was remembering the strange new girl in town from New York who had come looking for a place to stay.

  I smoothed the skirt of the shirtwaist dress I had worn to make a good impression. It was the only one I had, and I hunched my shoulders forward slightly, hoping Mrs Kelly hadn’t noticed how, like all cheap dresses, the bodice pulled too tightly across my breasts.

  ‘I’m looking for work, Mrs Kelly.’

  ‘And what kind of job are you looking for, dear?’

  I leaned forward. ‘Well, really, I’d like to work as a medical receptionist.’

  ‘As a what, did you say?’

  ‘A medical receptionist, ma’am. I’ve worked for two doctors before in New York.’

  Mrs Kelly’s arched eyebrows and averted eyes made me feel like I’d just belched without covering my mouth.

  ‘Well, there was an opening for a ward maid up at Newton State Hospital last week, but I think that’s already taken. And they usually like older women.’ She riffled absently through a file box on her desk and then turned back to me, her refined and motherly mouth slightly pursed. ‘You know, dear, there’s
not too much choice of jobs around here for Colored people, and especially not for Negro girls. Now if you could type …’

  ‘No, ma’am, I can’t,’ I said quickly. She closed her file with a snap.

  ‘I tell you what, dear. Most of our unskilled people find some sort of work in the “hardware” factories on the other side of town. Why don’t you try some of the places over there? They don’t register with us, but you can walk right in and ask if they’re hiring. I’m sorry I can’t help you.’ Mrs Kelly pushed her chair back, stood, and gave a little tug to her fawn-grey tailored suit. ‘As soon as you learn how to type you come back and see us, now, you hear?’

  I thanked her and left.

  The following week, I got a job running a commercial X-ray machine.

  Keystone Electronics was a relatively small factory as factories went in Stamford. It had a government contract to process and deliver quartz crystals used in radio and radar machinery. These small crystals were shipped from Brazil, cut at the plant and then ground, refined, and classified, according to how heavy an electrical charge they carried.

  It was dirty work. The two floors of the plant rang with the whine of huge cutting and refining machines. Mud used by the cutting crew was all over everything, cemented by the heavy oil that the diamond-grit blades were mounted in. Thirty-two mud saws were always running. The air was heavy and acrid with the sickly fumes of carbon tetrachloride used to clean the crystals. Entering the plant after 8:00 A.M. was like entering Dante’s Inferno. It was offensive to every sense, too cold and too hot, gritty, noisy, ugly, sticky, stinking, and dangerous.

  Men ran the cutting machines. Most local people would not work under such conditions, so the cutting crew was composed of Puerto Ricans who were recruited in New York City and who commuted every morning up to Stamford on company-paid tickets. Women read the crystals on a variety of X-ray machines, or washed the thousands and thousands of crystals processed daily in huge vats of carbon tetrachloride.