Still Mad

by Still Mad (retail) (epub)

  The “final temerity to get pregnant”: married in 1953 to Alfred Conrad, a graduate student in economics who went on to teach at Harvard, Rich quickly had three sons but was later to declare that “motherhood radicalized me.”39 In her ambitious treatise Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution (1976), she confessed that the domestic life that Plath had glamorized depleted and depressed her. After evading analysis of it for a while, she began to write her first, breakthrough feminist poem, “Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law,” which took her two years to compose, between 1958 and 1960. The poem, she remembered, was “jotted in fragments. . . . I despaired of doing any continuous work at this time. Yet I began to feel that my fragments and scraps had a common consciousness and a common theme, one which I would have been unwilling to put on paper at an earlier time because I had been taught that poetry should be ‘universal,’ which meant of course nonfemale.” 40

  But though the poem appears fragmented—it is, after all, a sequence—it is no more fragmentary than the verse sequences of, say, T. S. Eliot or Wallace Stevens, both of whom Rich had studied intensely as an undergraduate. In particular, like Eliot’s The Waste Land, it is both elliptical and allusive, deploying a scholarly range of quotations in support of its central argument. And like Eliot’s “Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” it is a portrait of a distinctive individual, in this case a young woman who chafes against the bonds imposed upon her by her status as a daughter-in-law—not just, that is, somebody’s wife and therefore the daughter-in-law of his parents but also a daughter of the law of patriarchal culture. Like Plath in “Daddy,” then, Rich was struggling to define the role into which her society had cast her and to envision a way of transcending that role.

  As she begins the poem, she focuses on a woman of an earlier generation, perhaps her own Southern mother, as she addresses a “You” who was “once a belle in Shreveport” but who has never grown out of her early triumph as a seductive young woman. For now, though this beauty is in the “prime” of life, her mind is “moldering like wedding-cake, / heavy with useless experience.” Quite literally, slices of wedding cake, heavy with candied fruits and nuts, are designed to be saved, though there is always the danger that they’ll be saved so long that they “molder.”41

  In a larger sense, the very idea of wedding cake announces the theme of the poem: marital domesticity and its discontents, or, to put it another way, the fate of women as daughters-in-law. For even while the older woman’s mind crumbles “to pieces under the knife-edge / of mere fact,” her rebellious daughter “grows another way,” and the next section of the ten-section sequence focuses on her rage as, trapped in her kitchen, she hears “angels,” messengers of difference, “chiding”: “Have no patience. . . . Be insatiable. . . . Save yourself; others you cannot save” (italics hers).42 These are commands that must have haunted Rich herself, who was struggling to nurture three small boys while also fostering her own talent. Might she too, she must have wondered, become a victim of the moldering wedding cake, the sickening meal fed to brides when they become daughters-in-law?43

  The next eight sections of “Snapshots” are essayistic, reportorial, as if, like Betty Friedan or Simone de Beauvoir, Rich was surveying the female condition—what it means to be the second sex and therefore obliged to acquiesce in the feminine mystique under the foundational law of patriarchal culture. “A thinking woman sleeps with monsters,” she asserts in the opening sentence of section 3. “The beak that grips her, she becomes.” Are women monsters, especially those who presume to think? And if you fear becoming a thinking (female) monster, if you are gripped by the harpy beak of terror, will you become a comparable freak of nature? In a society that instills such anxieties, women are estranged from each other and become each other’s enemies, stabbing each other in the back: “The argument ad feminam, all the old knives / that have rusted in my back, / I drive in yours, / ma semblable, ma soeur!” My likeness, my sister.44 Whatever applies to the sisterhood of thinking women, some of whom may be her readers, applies also to her, or so Rich suggests here.

  Like “Daddy,” “Snapshots” is a poem that is trapped until the very end in its own bitterness. As a cultural document, then, it seems for the most part to be a camera lens of the early sixties looking back in anger at the fifties and taking snapshots of that era. To be sure, in section 4 Rich broods on Emily Dickinson “writing, My Life had stood—a Loaded Gun— / in that Amherst pantry,” broods with such intensity that for a moment she might herself be sighting her subjects not with a camera but with a loaded gun.45 Mostly, though, she assembles a range of quotations from literary history to illuminate the rules and roles of the feminine mystique.

  Dulce ridens, dulce loquens,

  she shaves her legs until they gleam

  like petrified mammoth-tusk.46

  “Sweetly laughing, sweetly speaking”—the quote from Horace in section 5, and the next line too, might describe a fifties coed getting ready for a Big Date, until the last line of this three-line stanza drops the hypocrite reader into the abyss of prehistory. What would a New York beauty editor say to this: Honey, do you really want your legs to look like petrified mammoth-tusk? And do they look that way because such feminine cosmetic primping is also prehistoric?

  “When to her lute Corinna sings / neither words nor music are her own”: here is an outraged observation coming from a poet and literary scholar who of course knows the line about Corinna from the work of the Elizabethan poet Thomas Campion. But why should Corinna author anything? After all, as Rich acerbically notes, she lives only for romance: “Pinned down / by love.” And what does love teach? “Has Nature shown / her household books to you, daughter-in-law, / that her sons never saw?”47 Is a woman, whose existence is shaped by her sexuality, closer to “Mother” Nature than are her husband and sons—and therefore closer to understanding the “household books” of the natural world?

  Considering Corinna’s passivity, that seems unlikely. And what if Corinna were to rebel, like Mary Wollstonecraft, whom Rich quotes in the next section? Because that foundational feminist “fought with [against] what she partly understood,” “she was labelled harpy, shrew and whore.” And then there is the ultimate insult to women writers: “Not that it is done well, but / that it is done at all.” This means, to Rich, that “our mediocrities” are “over-praised.” If Corinna makes up a little verse of her own, her male interlocutors will gallantly praise her. But if she dares “to cast too bold a shadow / or smash the mold straight off”? The reward is “solitary confinement, / tear gas, attrition shelling.”48

  The dangers of authorship and authority match the dangers of domesticity. What can a daughter-in-law choose? If she seeks to smash the mold, she will be assaulted; if she acquiesces in the mold, she will molder. There seems to be no hope for women until the very last section of “Snapshots,” when the stasis of the camera is replaced by a visionary image. Here drawing on a passage from Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, the poet fantasizes the “coming” of a utopian redeemer, and although she concedes that this unprecedented figure has been “long about” her arrival, she is somehow imminent:

  I see her plunge

  breasted and glancing through the currents,

  taking the light upon her

  at least as beautiful as any boy

  or helicopter,

  poised, still coming,

  her fine blades making the air wince[.]49

  Note that although she is “breasted,” the visionary woman here is likened to a boy or a helicopter: she is alien, androgynous, almost out of science fiction.

  Years later, Rich was to claim that “Snapshots” was faulty because “too literary, too dependent on allusion. I hadn’t found the courage yet to do without authorities, or even to use the pronoun ‘I’—the woman in the poem is always ‘she.’ ”50 For their part, early reviewers, shocked by her repudiation of her youthful “modesty,” found the work grating.51 But with its camera eye on the targets of patriarchal culture, “Snapsho
ts” focused on centuries in which daughters-in-law were fed on moldering cake and responded with fury: “Be insatiable. . . . Save yourself; others you cannot save.” One wishes that Sylvia Plath could have said those words to herself, that icy night in February when she turned on the gas.

  But within a few years, Rich herself would be trying to save others. In the mid-sixties she moved with her family to New York, and by 1968 she was working in the SEEK (Search for Education, Elevation, and Knowledge) program at City College, where she taught Black literature to African American students. She had sought the job, she explained, “after King was shot, as a political act of involvement.”52 And among her new colleagues were Black writers and participants in the civil rights movement who would become some of her closest friends: Toni Cade Bambara, June Jordan, and especially Audre Lorde. By now, too, Rich had become a fervent admirer of Diane di Prima’s onetime lover, LeRoi Jones. In one of the “Blue Ghazals,” dated September 29, 1968, and dedicated to Jones, she declared that “Terribly far away I saw your mouth in the wild light: / it seemed to me you were shouting instructions to us all.”53

  NINA SIMONE, DIVA

  One of the major voices adding women’s issues to the protests mounted by the male-dominated civil rights movement issued from the mouth of a singer who had been denied the higher education she had sought. By 1963, Nina Simone was at the apex of a career in music that defied categorization. An accomplished classical pianist, she sang jazz, blues, pop, R&B, gospel, soul, calypso, and country as well as Broadway show tunes, French cabaret numbers, and Israeli folk music. According to Angela Davis, “She helped to introduce gender into our ways of imagining radical change.” Toni Morrison saw her as “indestructible, incorruptible. She even scared me a little.” When Morrison confessed to Nina Simone that she “wasn’t ready to take up arms [against racism] and that I’d rather take up my pen,” the singer would “get mad.” But “I guess she wasn’t ready to take up arms either because she channeled it all into her music”: “Nina Simone saved our lives,” Morrison believed. And Amiri Baraka, a longtime friend, defined her work as “American classical music.”54

  As in a Grimm brothers’ fairy tale, the transformation of Eunice Kathleen Waymon into Nina Simone involved three rebuffs, each followed by a telling response.55 An 11-year-old prodigy, she was about to perform her first piano recital in her segregated hometown when she saw her parents being removed from front-row seats to make room for a white family. The little girl promptly refused to play until her parents were reseated “and to hell with poise and elegance” (she characteristically added in her autobiography).56

  The second snub came after high school and a stint of lessons at Juilliard preparing for a scholarship examination at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia. Shocked at being rejected by the Curtis Institute, only later did she understand that “if blacks were going to be admitted then they were not going to accept an unknown black, that if they were to accept an unknown black then it was not going to be an unknown black girl, and if they were going to admit an unknown black girl it was not going to be a very poor unknown black girl.”57 Her reaction to this rejection explains the birth of her name. She started making money by playing the piano in an Atlantic City bar and, because it was a job requirement, singing along. Nina (the nickname bestowed by a boyfriend) Simone (an homage to the French actress Simone Signoret)58 came into being to shield her preacher-mother from knowledge of her daughter’s dabbling in the devil’s music.

  A classical musician improvising jazz, Nina Simone began infusing Bach fugues into her songs and demanding from audiences the sort of attention more common in concert halls than in drinking dives. From this point on, she would gain a reputation for being imperious and temperamental. When she played at the Village Gate, she arrived with bodyguards “to protect the public from her, not to protect her from the public,” some believed, since at times she lashed out at noisy fans. She would go on to insist throughout her career, “If they’re going to compare me to somebody, they should compare me to Maria Callas. She was a diva, I’m a diva.”59

  However, Nina Simone’s response to the third insult of her life illuminates the vulnerability of a woman who bore herself with regality on stage. After a dinner party to celebrate her engagement to Andy Stroud, a New York City policeman, his jealousy led to a brutal beating: “He hit me in the cab, on the pavement outside my apartment building, in the lobby of the building, in the elevator up to the twelfth floor and along the passageway to my apartment.”60 Tied up and battered, she recounted later, she was then raped. Yet she decided to marry Andy Stroud and let him take over the management of her career and her money.

  Why is not altogether clear, though Simone sensed that “loneliness and insecurity made my mind up for me”: “Andy was a strong man and I loved him. I forced myself to believe he wouldn’t hit me any more.”61 She knew that she had talent, but she was also “a girl” with “desires like other girls”: “I wanted it all. I wanted everything.”62 She embarked on “a traditional marriage,” in which the husband would decide “This is how it will be.”63

  With Andy Stroud as her manager, a new baby named Lisa, and a triumphant solo show at Carnegie Hall, the 30-year-old Nina Simone looked to be getting it all by the time she was ensconced in Mount Vernon, only 10 miles away from Lorraine Hansberry’s place in Croton-on-Hudson. On April 12, 1963, the night of Simone’s debut at Carnegie Hall, Hansberry phoned to discuss what could be done about “Martin Luther King Jr.’s arrest in Birmingham.”64 A godmother to Lisa, Hansberry sparked Nina Simone’s “thinking about myself as a black person in a country run by white people and a woman in a world run by men.” They talked about “Marx, Lenin, and revolution—real girls’ talk.” Although Andy Stroud tried to focus her on career goals, she was galvanized by the imprisonment of King, by the murders of Medgar Evers and of four little girls in a bombed Birmingham church. “It was more than I could take, and I sat struck dumb in my den like St. Paul on the road to Damascus: all the truths that I had denied to myself for so long rose up and slapped my face.”65

  The sequence of traumas made her think of killing someone, so she tried to make a zip gun. When her husband intervened—“I knew nothing about killing and I did know about music”66—she wrote her first civil rights song, the brilliant and haunting “Mississippi Goddam.” Protesting the instructions of whites to “Go slow,” with a chorus emphasizing that “Do it slow” is precisely the problem, she signals the passion that would catapult civil rights rhetoric into Black power demands. Its lyrics resound like gunshots:

  You told me to wash and clean my ears

  And talk real fine just like a lady

  And you’d stop calling me Sister Sadie

  Oh but this whole country is full of lies

  You’re all gonna die and die like flies.67

  According to her daughter, Nina Simone dated the break between her “pre-getting mad” and her “post-getting mad” voice to this 1963 hit: “it was as if her voice just dropped, and it never returned to its former octave,” Lisa recalled.68 Quite a few members of her audiences at civil rights rallies would get mad along with her, while in more conventional venues others, not unlike the usually intrepid Toni Morrison, would be unnerved by the militancy of her performances.

  During the mid-sixties, Nina Simone raged against the situation of Black women. The new songs she sang—some adopted and reinterpreted, others of her own creation—grew out of a tormented identity: “I can’t be white and I’m the kind of colored girl who looks like everything white people despise or have been taught to despise,” she wrote in an undated note in her diary. “If I were a boy, it wouldn’t matter so much, but I’m a girl and in front of the public all the time wide open for them to jeer and approve or disapprove.”69 Simone’s presentations of “Pirate Jenny,” “Go Limp,” and “Four Women”—works very different in tone and structure—manifest her insights into the sexual politics of race.

  Transporting Jenny, one of the resentf
ul whores in Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill’s Threepenny Opera, to a flophouse in South Carolina, Simone introduced “Pirate Jenny” by explaining that Jenny is going to kill everyone in the town and go home. Jenny’s taunting lyrics—as she scrubs the floors, makes the beds, but defiantly grins—are juxtaposed with a menacing refrain about a black freighter in the harbor, with a skull on its masthead and guns on its bow. “You gentlemen can wipe that smile off your face,” Jenny the domestic, maid, and prostitute declares while considering her destiny as Jenny the pirate. It begins with her “stepping out in the morning / Looking nice with a ribbon in my hair.” The men swarming on the black freighter bring her a succession of chained people. “Kill them NOW, or LATER?” they ask. Pirate Jenny whispers urgently, “Right now!” As the bodies pile up, she adds, “That’ll learn ya!” With slow, descending notes, Jenny describes the freighter disappearing out to sea: “And on it is me.”70

  Piratical Jenny’s dreams of killing all the gentlemen who have been ordering her around come true on the black freighter. According to Angela Davis, Simone redefined “the content of this song to depict the collective rage of black women domestic workers.” By evoking The Threepenny Opera, another commentator noted, “Simone associated her own anti-racism with Brecht’s antifascism.”71 An apocalyptic revenge fantasy against what she would later call the United Snakes of America, “Pirate Jenny” puts on display Simone’s acting skills even as it envisions an escape to a Black homeland.72