“Everything to make me dislike you. But, as I said, I am not the disliking…”
“We have never even talked.”
“I never talked to Hitler. I never talked to Wallace. I never talked to Tshombe, and I certainly never talked to Uncle Tom….”
“So you think I’m an Uncle Tom too?”
“I guess you want me to be frank. So let me say I think that you are worse than an Uncle Tom. At least Uncle Toms tom to survive. But you bow and scrape with such open-eyed sincerity. You are the most sincere person about kissing…”
“I only help Miss Gottlieb because she is old and crippled.”
“Most of those teachers are old and they are all damn cripples,” Daphne said scornfully. “Their society made them that way and they don’t need our help to stay that way.”
“Miss Gottlieb is so helpless.”
“And she needs you to help her? She made it clear that she doesn’t. She treats you like dirt. She treats us all like dirt. That’s part of her disease. She actually believes we are dirt.”
“I don’t think that you…”
“She needs us, yes. But not in the way you think. And we help her. We help her by just sitting in her classroom so that she can vent her hatred on us or else she’d go mad. Who else can she vent her hatred on?”
“You don’t understand,” Ruby insisted patiently. “I can’t look at anyone and see them…”
“What would she have done if you had never left your island? Have you ever asked yourself that? Don’t you think she would have found someone else? Don’t you think that she has always found someone through the years whom she makes the target of all her lovely invectives?”
“Miss Gottlieb doesn’t mean half the things she says. She says them be—”
“Because they are in her to say.” It was obvious that Daphne, as in school, believed only in her own ideas. “And because they’re in her she will be saying them until the other half of her dies, and she will be thinking them until the last pinpoint of light goes out in her brain.
“She and those like her hate us for being black, and they hate us because they need us. Who else can crippled outcasts like them teach? Decent schools will not have them. They sit there being paid to tell us all kinds of things against ourselves; then they hate us if we don’t accept it as gospel.
“They build themselves like gods on our backs, destroy us so that we are little imitations of themselves. Only most of us can’t hide our distortions with higher education. Their educational system only makes us fit for the ghettoes, where we end up destroying each other.
“You see? That’s what being God is all about. So, if they are such gods, why do they need your help?”
Anger flushed Daphne’s face, the hate she denied quivered there, blazed out of her eyes. “But you, you have to prove you are bigger, better. Virgin Mary. Pontius Pilate, Ju—”
“Stop it! Don’t. Please don’t. Can’t you see, I am not an American! I cannot hate like you!”
Daphne’s head snapped to attention. Her smoldering eyes cooled slowly, grew thoughtful, reflective. Perhaps in the labyrinth of her mind the thought was raised that she had ruled out options, jumped to conclusions for which there might be more than one answer. She leaned forward, pointing her finger.
But at that moment someone brushed the curtain. Ruby turned, caught a fleeting impression of a man: tall, white. The curtain, however, was only slightly drawn and it remained only an impression. She turned back, but the chance for communication had slipped by in that second. Daphne sat back in her chair, toothpick between her teeth, a sardonic expression on her face.
Silence settled between them, heavy, undefinable, and Ruby, searching through Daphne’s eyes, found in them an agelessness, a network of complexities far beyond her abilities to cope with.
Is it possible to be in the same city…the same class…certainly the same age group…and be so far apart? If so, then why am I here? What strange force directed me here…when it was so hard…so terribly hard?
She stood up, defeat weighing heavy on her thighs. She remained by the bed, needing words, words that eluded her. She looked at Daphne, begging for help. But Daphne refused her, and Ruby stood in that heavy silence, looking into the face with the mocking eyes, the mocking smile that was forcing the meeting, the moment, into history. Then suddenly the silence was broken, the weight lifted.
“Damn, Daphne, you got to start preaching so early in the morning?” Ruby knew it was Daphne’s mother because of her eyes. The woman stepped into the room past the heavy curtains, her manner brisk and breezy. “Damn, can hear you clear to the Bronx.”
Apart from the eyes; the difference between them was startling. Where Daphne was at least six feet tall, Mrs. Duprey was possibly two or three inches over five. She was tiny, from her well-formed features down to her feet encased in spiked heels. She was fair, much fairer than Daphne, and her hair was red, touched-up, although she had a redhead’s complexion. Where Daphne’s skin was smooth, poreless, Mrs. Duprey’s was coarse with enlarged pores, giving her the look of hard living rather than of aging. But nowhere was the contrast so startling as in their speech patterns.
“Hey kitten.” Mrs. Duprey flashed Ruby a professional smile. “You see what happens when you get up so damn early? A goddamn early worm is always snatched by a waiting bird. And the bird that sticks its beak out too early has had it at the claws of some vulture.”
“Mumsy, this is Ruby.” Daphne smiled affectionately, ignoring her mother’s jibes. “She’s in my class. We were here discuss—”
“Yeah, I heard,” Mrs. Duprey said sarcastically. Then to Ruby: “I got to give it to you, baby. You sure know where to come to get the bull.”
Mrs. Duprey’s need to tear through her daughter’s arrogance gave Ruby a feeling of comfort. It rounded the edge off her ignorance, redressed the balance in the room, handed her an ease with which she could speak to Daphne again.
“It is rather early,” Daphne said, undaunted. “But we will forgive her this time, won’t we Mumsy?” She went to her mother, hugged her roughly, kissed her, and teasingly ruffled the well-groomed hair.
Mrs. Duprey pushed Daphne away angrily, glared at her, and patted her hair into place. “Anyhow,” she said, “I got to get my heels clicking. We underdevelopeds got to serve our time.”
“Mumsy works as a barmaid in a restaurant…”
“In the heart of Harlem,” Mrs. Duprey supplied, her voice edged in sarcasm. “The last stand of us high-yellers. Once upon a time we were all the craze, from one part of New York City to the other. But now, Black Is Beautiful. Those places that pay gets either blacks or whites. Either the afros or the straights. We in-betweeners are being eased out into the greasy spoons.” She swayed out of the room, her high heels clicking.
“Mumsy used to be in show business, aiming for the big time,” Daphne explained, a smile flitting across her face. Then, as though by common consent as the high heels clicked down the hall, they remained silent, listening. When the door slammed, Daphne yawned, continued. “She wanted to be a woman-libber but has to settle for being a liberated black. She’s bitter.” Stretching, she added, “And so you have met my family. They are fine people.”
Nothing to answer. Nothing to add. Ruby walked to the door, stood, reluctant to open it, waiting. Waiting for Daphne to stop her. She touched the doorknob. “Daphne, do you think that Miss O’Brien is a cripple like the rest of the teachers in the system?”
She felt, rather than saw, the head jerk to attention. Daphne’s tone was cool, cautious. “There are always rules that are proven by the exception— and these exceptions we should take advantage of.” Ruby waited. Nothing more? “She is also a strong woman who can bend to pick up her own pointers.”
Ruby opened the door, sifting Daphne’s words for hidden meanings. It was too difficult. “I—I’m sorry I disturbed you. I—I just thought it would be nice to have a friend. I—am lonely.”
“You-don’t-know-what-the-word-lonely-mea
ns.”
Daphne spoke slowly, holding Ruby at the door with her emphasis. “I happen to be the loneliest person in the world—with reason, to be sure. Do you see all those books? I have read them all—or almost. I am self-educated. That hardly attracts many friends. My father used to say that if you don’t educate yourself, you won’t get educated. And he was right. He started me reading when I was five, sent me to private school when I was twelve, and then he died.
“Can you imagine what it is, sitting in classrooms with pink-faced teachers who cannot teach, knowing more than they can ever know? That-is-the-loneliest-trip-in-the-world.”
“You taught yourself everything? Even math?”
“What came hard I was tutored for. My mother paid. She did it under duress, but she did it.”
“You are hard on her.”
“We are hard on each other,” Daphne said brusquely. “I just happen to be bigger. But she can put down those size threes of hers and a hurricane can’t budge her.”
Ruby looked around the room. Phyllisia would be in heaven here. “You really read all of these books?”
“My father was a black nationalist. Books were his bible.”
“And he died.”
“Yes.”
“My mother is dead.”
“What did she die of?”
“Cancer.”
“One can almost call that a noble disease.”
“What did your father die of?”
Sudden agitation came over Daphne. She hammered her fist on her palm angrily. “Well,” she said finally, “it wasn’t noble, that’s for sure.” Then, pulling herself together, she added, “Let us just say he went out of here on a hummer.”
Feeling the intensity of Daphne’s anger, Ruby did not ask what she meant. Instead she announced, “I guess I’d better be going.”
“Before you tell me why you came?” The sardonic smile back on her face, Daphne stretched out on the bed.
“I—I told you.”
“I didn’t hear.”
“I—I wanted to be your friend.”
“And so now you are leaving. You get me out of bed early on a Saturday morning to tell me what you can say any day in school? You are satisfied?” Ruby looked at the floor. “Do you think you have achieved what you came for—or have you changed your mind?”
“No—no, I haven’t changed…”
“Then why are you leaving?”
“Because I…Because I…”
“Dear me, sirs. What trouble she goes through to make friends and how easily discouraged she becomes.” Getting up from bed, Daphne went to stand over Ruby, looking down as though from a great height. She held Ruby’s chin, tilted her head back, kissed her full on the lips. Ruby gasped indignantly, her brown eyes wide, insulted.
Laughing, Daphne walked away, lay across the bed. “Good-bye, Bronzie. That is another trait I detected in you. Did anyone ever tell you what a great hypocrite you are?”
“Bronzie?” Ruby did not move. “Bronzie?”
“Yes. That’s my private name for you. Bronzie. Brown, brown eyes, brown skin, brown hair—a perfect, natural bronze—and a hypocrite.” “Why would you say that? It’s not true! I never lie!”
“I bet you don’t. I just bet you don’t. That’s your great tragedy. You never think. You just say a lot of garbage that comes to mind and you call that truth. Good-bye. Go on—go out of that door. But don’t forget—above all to thine own self be true, and it follows—etcetera, etcetera. Go on home.”
But now it was Daphne who was lying Ruby realized. Daphne who was telling her to go yet not allowing her to go. Her tone was angry, a demanding anger. She was challenging her, daring her to walk out of that door, daring her to say good-bye. And Ruby could not walk away, could not say those parting, never-to-be-spoken-again words.
Ruby walked over to the bed, sat next to Daphne, touched the broad shoulder. “Daphne?” Then she was in the strong arms, feeling the full strength of those arms. Her mouth was being kissed, and she responded eagerly to those full, blessedly full lips. At last she found herself, a likeness to herself, a response to her needs, her age, an answer to her loneliness.
“If you don’t know what you are doing”—Daphne pushed her away, searched her eyes—“you had better stop and ask somebody.”
“Daphne. Daphne. I have never had a nickname before. I love that name—Bronzie.”
AUDRE LORDE
[1934–1992]
THE MOST REVERED AFRICAN AMERICAN LESBIAN WRITER OF her time, Audre Lorde stood as the political conscience of a generation of lesbian feminists. She admonished white, middle-class feminist academics for what she saw as their complacency in the face of classism and racism. “The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house,” she wrote, a reference to what she saw as the hypocrisy of white lesbian feminism. She called on antiracist white feminists and lesbians to “reach down into that deep place of knowledge inside herself and touch that terror and loathing of any difference that lives there.”
Born to working-class West Indian immigrants, Lorde was raised in New York City. On graduating from Columbia University in 1961, she married Edwin Ashley Rollins, with whom she had two children, before divorcing in 1970. Lorde worked as a public librarian in Manhattan until 1968, when a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts enabled her to take a position as poet in residence at Tougaloo College in Mississippi.
That same year saw the publication of her debut book of poetry, The First Cities (1968), followed by the more politically charged Cabels to Rage (1970), the National Book Award nominee From a Land Where Other People Live (1973), and later her most critically acclaimed collection, The Black Unicorn (1978). Among the distinguishing features of Lorde’s poetry are her openness around her lesbianism and her outspoken stance on matters of racial and sexual liberation. Indeed, her artistic concerns suited the political climate and cultural transitions of the 1960s. For Lorde, however, her writing was more than merely protest literature; it was, as
she described it, the very sustenance for her well-being, if not survival, as an African American lesbian living with homophobia, racism, and sexism. Her work has also been cited as an especially fundamental source of inspiration for subsequent black lesbian poets, including Pat Parker and Cheryl Clarke, among others.
Lorde also wrote several landmark works of nonfiction, including two autobiographical texts, The Cancer Journals (1980), a chronicle of her struggle with breast cancer, and Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (1982), Lorde’s classic account of her coming of age in the pre-Stonewall era. In titling her fictive memoir Zami, a West Indian name for women who work together as friends and lovers, Lorde was suggesting that white American demarcations of lesbianism fail to appreciate the complexities of black women’s culture that fall beyond conventional parameters of sexual labels. This complication of sexual and racial identity politics is also a hallmark of her essay collections, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (1984) and A Burst of Light (1988). Before her death from cancer in 1992, Lorde was the recipient of a number of prestigious awards, including being named the first woman Poet Laureate of New York State in 1991.
This excerpt from the final chapter of Zami introduces Afrekete, or “Kitty,” a young African American lesbian whom Audre meets in 1957. The book is subtitled a “biomythology,” indicating that traditions of autobiography and memoir have been overturned with the use of “mythology” or fiction. Thus, while the work recalls the author’s life from her early years, it does not function as a conventional memoir. Zami is remarkable for its rare and authentic rendering of 1950s lesbian culture from the point of view of a black lesbian feminist.
from Zami: A New Spelling of My Name
[1982]
Gerri was young and Black and lived in Queens and had a powder-blue Ford that she nicknamed Bluefish. With her carefully waved hair and button-down shirts and gray-flannel slacks, she looked just this side of square, without being square at all, once you got to know her.
&nbs
p; By Gerri’s invitation and frequently by her wheels, Muriel and I had gone to parties on weekends in Brooklyn and Queens at different women’s houses.
One of the women I had met at one of these parties was Kitty.
When I saw Kitty again one night years later in the Swing Rendezvous or the Pony Stable or the Page Three—that tour of second-string gay-girl bars that I had taken to making alone that sad lonely spring of 1957—it was easy to recall the St. Alban’s smell of green Queens summer-night and plastic couch-covers and liquor and hair oil and women’s bodies at the party where we had first met.
In that brick-faced frame house in Queens, the downstairs pine-paneled recreation room was alive and pulsing with loud music, good food, and beautiful Black women in all different combinations of dress.
There were whip-cord summer suits with starch-shiny shirt collars open at the neck as a concession to the high summer heat, and white gabardine slacks with pleated fronts or slim ivy-league styling for the very slender. There were wheat-colored Cowden jeans, the fashion favorite that summer, with knife-edge creases, and even then, one or two back-buckled grey pants over well-chalked buckskin shoes. There were garrison belts galore, broad black leather belts with shiny thin buckles that originated in army-navy surplus stores, and oxford-styled shirts of the new, iron-free dacron, with its stiff, see-through crispness. These shirts, short-sleeved and man-tailored, were tucked neatly into belted pants or tight, skinny straight skirts. Only the one or two jersey knit shirts were allowed to fall freely outside.
Bermuda shorts, and their shorter cousins, Jamaicas, were already making their appearance on the dyke-chic scene, the rules of which were every bit as cutthroat as the tyrannies of Seventh Avenue or Paris. These shorts were worn by butch and femme alike, and for this reason were slow to be incorporated into many fashionable gay-girl wardrobes, to keep the signals clear. Clothes were often the most important way of broadcasting one’s chosen sexual role.
Here and there throughout the room the flash of brightly colored below-the-knee full skirts over low-necked tight bodices could be seen, along with tight sheath dresses and the shine of high thin heels next to bucks and sneakers and loafers.
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