Zami

by Audre Lorde

  At the same time, on a true and deeper level, Ginger and I met as two young Black women in need of each other’s warmth and blood-assurance, able to share the passions within our bodies, and no amount of pretending that we were pretending could change that. Yet, we were both very much invested in the denial of our importance to each other. For different reasons, we both needed to pretend we didn’t care.

  Each of us was very busy being cool, ignoring and misnaming the passionate intensity with which we came together wherever possible, usually on that old brass bed in the insulated sunporch, that drafty haven on Walker Road which we turned tropical with the heat of our young bodies’ wildness.

  As long as I convinced myself that I wasn’t really involved emotionally with Ginger, I could delight in this new experience. Her favorite expression was, ‘Be cool, girl’, and I congratulated myself on how cool I was. It didn’t bother me, I maintained, that Ginger went out on dates which Cora arranged.

  With her typical aplomb, Cora welcomed my increased presence around the house with the rough familiarity and browbeating humor due another one of her daughters. If she recognized the sounds emanating from the sunporch on the nights I slept over, or our haggard eyes the next day, she ignored them. But she made it very clear that she expected Ginger to get married again.

  ‘Friends are nice, but marriage is marriage,’ she said to me one night as she helped me make a skirt on her machine, and I wondered why Ginger had asked me over and then gone to the movies with a friend of Cora’s from American Cyanimid. ‘And when she gets home don’t be thumping that bed all night, neither, because it’s late already and you girls have work tomorrow.’

  But I thought of little else at work now other than the night pleasures of Ginger’s body, and how I could arrange to get her over to Mill River Road for an hour or so after work. It was a little more private than Walker Road, except that my old bed creaked so badly that we always had to put the mattress on the floor.

  19

  The week before Christmas I fell off my stool at work, hitting my head against the brick half-wall that separated us from the cutters, and getting a mild concussion. I was in the hospital when Ginger brought me a telegram from my sister saying that my father had had another severe stroke. It was Christmas Eve. I signed myself out of the hospital and caught a train for New York City.

  I had not seen any member of my family for a year and a half.

  The next few weeks were a haze of headache, and other people’s emotions swirling around me. I went back to work after Christmas, commuting to and from New York City to visit my father in the hospital. Sometimes Ginger came with me after work.

  The fog was heavy and chilling over the streets of Stamford the night my father died. No cars moved. I walked two miles to the station to catch the 9:30 train to New York. Ginger walked with me as far as Crispus Attucks. I was terrified I was going to trip on a curbstone, the fog was so thick. The streetlights glowed faintly like distant moons. The streets were empty and eerily quiet, as if the whole world had died, not only my father in that dim oxygenated room on the terminal ward of the Medical Center in New York.

  During the week after my father’s death, I stayed at my mother’s house. Most of the time she was sedated against her frenzied and awful grief, and Helen and I handled the flow of people passing through the house. Phyllis was married and expecting her second child in two weeks, and could only attend the funeral. She lent me a dark grey coat to wear to the church.

  During the week, I fought hard to remind myself that I was now a stranger in this house. But it did give me a new perspective on my mother. There had only been one human being whom she had ever entertained upon the earth as her equal; this was my father, and now he was dead. I saw the desolate loneliness that this exclusiveness had won her, and against which she only occasionally closed her hawk-grey eyes. But she looked through me and my sisters as if we were glass.

  I saw my mother’s pain, and her blindness, and her strength, and for the first time I began to see her as separate from me, and I began to feel free of her.

  My sister Helen withdrew into her flippant shell for protection, and endlessly played a record which she had just gotten on the phonograph in the parlor. Day and night, over and over, for seven days:

  I get the blues when we dance

  I get the blues in advance

  For I know you’ll be gone

  and I’ll be here all alone

  So I get the blues in advance.

  Some get the blues from a song

  Some when love has come and gone

  You don’t know how I cry

  When you tell me goodbye …

  Returning to Stamford after the funeral, I realized that I needed to be even further away from New York. I decided to make as much money as I could and go to Mexico as soon as possible.

  To that end and because Cora invited me, I gave up my room on Mill River Road with its creaky bed, and moved my belongings into the sunporch on Walker Road. The ten dollars a week room and board was less than what I was spending for both before. Cora said the extra cash was a help to her already strained budget, and besides, I was eating her out of house and home anyway.

  Ginger told me that a new girl, Ada, had been hired to run my machine at the plant. When I returned, since I was a member of the union, I was given another job. I was moved on to an X-ray machine in the reading room, where the finished electronic crystals were fine-read according to strength of charge, then racked for packing.

  Although this job paid the same $1.10 an hour, all the jobs in the RR were preferable and sought after. The room was in the middle of the floor, enclosed by glass panels, and the fierce sensory assaults of the rest of the plant were somewhat muted.

  We sat at our machines in a circle, facing outward, our backs to each other to discourage talking. There were six commercial X-ray machines and a desk in the middle for Rose, our forewoman. We were never long away from her watchful eye.

  But working in the RR meant there was a chance to make piecework bonus.

  Each reader obtained her crystals from the washing cage in boxes of two hundred. Taking them back to our machines, we inserted the tiny, ¾-inch squares of wafer-thin rock one by one into the throat of the X-ray machine, twirled the dial until the needle jumped to its highest point, powered by the tiny X-ray beam flashed across the crystal, snatched it off the mount, racked it in the proper slot, and then shot another crystal into the machine. With concentration and dexterity, the average amount one could read in a day was one thousand crystals.

  By not taking the time to flip down the protective shield that kept the X ray from hitting our fingers, we could increase that number to about eleven hundred. Any crystals over twelve hundred read in one day were paid for as piecework, at the rate of $2.50 a hundred. Some of the women who had been at Keystone for years had perfected the motions and moved so swiftly that they were able to make from five to ten dollars some weeks in bonus. For most of them, the tips of their fingers were permanently darkened from exposure to X ray. Before I finally left Keystone Electronics, there were dark marks on my fingers also, that only gradually faded.

  After each crystal was read, it was flipped out of the machine and rapidly slipped into one of five slots in a rack that sat to the side of each of our machines. From these racks, periodically, a runner from the packing department would collect the crystals of whatever category was needed for the packers. Since it was not possible to keep track of the crystals after they were read, a tally was kept at the washing cage of how many boxes of crystals were taken daily by each reader. It was upon this count that our bonuses were based.

  Throughout the day, Rose came by each machine regularly and spot-checked crystals from each of our racks, checking to make sure that no one racked unread crystals, or rushed through crystals with incorrect readings in order to raise our counts and make bonus.

  The first two weeks I worked in the RR I talked to no one, raced my readings every day, never flipped the shield,
and made three dollars in bonus. I decided I would have to reassess the situation. Ginger and I talked about it one night.

  ‘You’d better slow down a little at work. The word’s going out you’re an eager beaver, brown-nosing Rose.’

  I was offended. ‘I’m not ass-kissing, I’m trying to make some money. There’s nothing wrong with that, is there?’

  ‘Don’t you know those rates are set high like that so nobody can beat them? If you break your ass to read so many, you’re going to show up the other girls, and before you know it they’re going to raise the day rate again, figuring if you can do it so can everybody. And that just makes everybody look bad. They’re never going to let you make any money in that place. All the books you read and you don’t know that yet?’ Ginger rolled over and tapped the book I was reading on my pillow.

  But I was determined. I knew I could not take Keystone Electronics for much longer, and I knew I needed some money put aside before I left. Where would I go when I got back to New York? Where would I live until I got a job? And how long would I have to look for work? And on the horizon like a dim star, was my hope of going to Mexico. I had to make some money.

  Ginger and Ada, her new workmate, went to the movies more and more often now that I was living at the Thurmans’, and I was determined not to care. But my sixth sense told me I had to get away, and soon.

  My daily rate of crystals began to increase steadily. Rose came by more and more often to my machine, but could find nothing wrong with my crystals, nor their slotting. She even went so far as to ask me to turn out my jeans pockets one evening. I was outraged, but complied. By the next payday, I had made an additional thirty dollars in bonus money for two weeks. That was almost as much as my weekly wages. It became the talk of the RR women.

  ‘How does she manage to do all those?’

  ‘Just wait and see. She’s going to burn her fingers off before she’s through.’ The women lowered their voices as I came back from the cage with a fresh box of crystals. But Ada, who had stopped by for a brief chat, did not care whether or not I heard her parting words.

  ‘I don’t know what she’s doing with them crystals, but I bet she’s not reading them!’

  She was right. I could not even tell Ginger how I was managing to pull down such high bonuses, although she often asked. The truth was, I would slip crystals into my socks every time I went to the bathroom. Once inside the toilet stall, I chewed them up with my strong teeth and flushed the little shards of rock down the commode. I could take care of between fifty and a hundred crystals a day in that manner, taking a handful from each box I signed out.

  I knew Ginger was hurt by my silence, and by what she saw as my disloyalty to the other RR women. I was angered by the feeling of persistent guilt that her words aroused in me, but I could say nothing. I could also say nothing about the increasing time she and Ada spent together.

  I longed for a chance to be alone, to enjoy the privacy that was not possible once I started to share the sunporch on Walker Road. I hated the amount of time I spent thinking about Ginger and Ada. I began to feel more and more desperate to get out of Stamford, and my bonuses went up.

  One day in the beginning of March, I saw Rose talking to Bernie, the plant’s efficiency expert, and looking after me speculatively as I came out of the john. I knew my days at Keystone were numbered. That week I made forty dollars in bonuses.

  On Friday, Rose told me that the plant was cutting back readers and they were going to have to let me go. Since I was a member of the union, they gave me two weeks’ severance pay, so I would leave immediately and not make a fuss. Even though it was what I wanted to happen, I still cried a little on the way home. ‘Nobody likes to be fired,’ Ginger said and held my hand.

  Cora was sorry to lose the extra income. Ginger said she’d miss me, but I could tell she was also secretly relieved, as she confided to me months later. I made plans to return to New York City.

  20

  I don’t know why I was seized with such a desire to go to Mexico. Ever since I could remember Mexico had been the accessible land of color and fantasy and delight, full of sun, music and song. And from civics and geography in grade school, I knew it was attached to where I lived, and that intrigued me. That meant, if need be, I could always walk there.

  I was happy to learn that Jean’s boyfriend, Alf, who was in Mexico painting, would soon be coming home.

  When I returned to New York after my father’s death, going to Mexico became my chief goal. I saw very little of my mother. Where I would have expected grief for my father, there was only numbness. I stayed with Jean and her friends in a West Side apartment while I hunted for work. I eventually went to work as a clinic clerk in a Health Center, and moved in to share an apartment with Rhea Held, a progressive white woman who was a friend of Jean and Alf’s.

  No matter what emotional scrapes I got into that summer, the idea of Mexico shone like a beacon that I could count on, keeping me steady. The money I was saving from work, together with the small amount I had received from my father’s insurance, would make it possible. I was determined to go, and that determination was fed by the deepening political gloom and red-baiting hysteria.

  I became deeply involved in working with the Committee to Free the Rosenbergs; even so, the months in New York between my return from Stamford and my going to Mexico were very much a sojourn to me.

  Rhea Held and I lived quite well together in the bright, sunny seventh-floor walk-up apartment on Seventh Street on the Lower East Side, now becoming known as the East Village. It was at times difficult and new – learning to live with Rhea, learning to share space with anyone, and a white woman, too, especially since I had no deep emotional bonds with her, only warm and casual pleasantries.

  The work at the health center was interestingly medical and the hours, not tedious. I felt set apart from the other women with whom I worked, by virtue of their lunch-talk about weekend dates (while my noontime fantasies were still filled with the remembered joys of Ginger’s bed).

  Spring moved to summer. We demonstrated, picketed, stuffed envelopes, rang doorbells, and went to Washington for the Rosenbergs.

  The second time I came to Washington, I traveled by bus. The trip took six hours and we boarded the buses at Union Square at 6:00 A.M. on a Sunday morning. It was not a pleasure trip, this time. We were seeking life for the parents of two little boys who traveled on the same bus in which I was riding. The Rosenbergs were about to be sacrificed, and this was a last-ditch visit to the white house to beg for a stay of execution.

  Sunday morning, drizzly and cold for early June. I marched up and down with Jean and Rhea and the other women I had come with, hoping it would make a difference, still not really believing that any country I was associated with could murder these children’s parents and call it legal. And they were white, too, which made it even harder for me to believe.

  This time, whether or not I could eat vanilla ice cream at a soda fountain never came up. I had neither the money nor the time to find out. We picketed the white house, sang our brave little songs, handed in our petitions of mercy, and then climbed back into the buses for the long wet ride home.

  One week later, President Eisenhower signed into law an executive decree that said I could eat anything I wanted to anywhere in Washington, DC, including vanilla ice cream. It didn’t mean too much to me by then.

  In the evenings after work, I saw Jean and Alf, who were now married, or went to meetings with Rhea. Meetings where frightened people tried to keep some speck of hope alive, despite political disagreement, while all around us was the possible threat of dying like the Rosenbergs, or at least the threat of losing jobs or being fingered for life. Downtown at political meetings and uptown at the Harlem Writers Guild, friends, acquaintances, and simple people were terrorized at the thought of having to answer, ‘Are you or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party?’

  The Rosenbergs’ struggle became synonymous for me with being able to live in this country at
all, with being able to survive in hostile surroundings. But my feelings of connection with most of the people I met in progressive circles, were as tenuous as those I had with my co-workers at the Health Center. I could imagine these comrades, Black and white, among whom color and racial differences could be openly examined and talked about, nonetheless one day asking me accusingly, ‘Are you or have you ever been a member of a homosexual relationship?’ For them, being gay was ‘bourgeois and reactionary’, a reason for suspicion and shunning. Besides, it made you ‘more susceptible to the FBI’.

  The Rosenbergs were electrocuted on June 19, 1953 – two weeks after we had picketed the white house. I walked away from the memorial rally in Union Square Park into the warm Village night, tears streaming down my face for them, for their sons, for all our wasted efforts, for myself – wondering whether there was any place in the world that was different from here, anywhere that could be safe and free, not really even sure of what being safe and free could mean. But it did not mean being lonely, disillusioned, betrayed. I felt like I was thirty years old.

  I ran into Bea coming out of a music store next to Rienzi’s Coffee Shop. I was grateful for her face, familiar yet different from the ones with which I had shared the grief and intensity of the last few weeks. I invited her home to Seventh Street for more coffee. Rhea had left for the weekend, seeking her own solace for the failure and grief we both shared.

  Bea and I had met at Bennington College the year before in spring when I was visiting Jill. Bea was also there visiting a friend. Our eyes had met several times during that crazy drunken weekend, and once at 2:00 A.M. in the cafeteria, Bea and I had talked while the others slept, deciding that she and I felt separated from the other girls because we were both a few months older, and we lived alone; that is, we were responsible for ourselves. There was some brief, guarded intellectual conversation about a shared appreciation of so many beautiful girls in one dormitory. Since then, Bea had broken up with a lover and was living in Philadelphia with a group of other women who had rented a house together. In the meantime, I had been to Stamford and met Ginger.