Zami

by Audre Lorde

  Maybe that is all any bravery is, a stronger fear of not being brave.

  Gennie and I had a fight over something or the other at the end of January. We didn’t talk or see each other again for two weeks. She called me on my birthday, and we saw each other a few days later, on Washington’s Birthday. We held hands in Central Park Zoo and watched the monkeys. The mandrill looked at us with great sad eyes and we agreed with him that whether we were angry or not we’d never go that long without talking again, because friendship was too important and besides, neither one of us could remember what we’d argued about.

  Afterward, we went to her house. It started to snow and we lay on the couch with Gennie’s head on my tummy, and we toasted marshmallows and smoked cigarettes. That bedroom was the only private room in the house. Gennie slept on a couch in the living room, except when her uncle came, and then she slept on the floor. She said she hated not having anywhere permanent to sleep, or keep her clothes.

  It was the middle of March when Gennie came to my house one night. She called and said she had to talk to me and could she come over. My mother gave a grudging permission. I said we had to study for a geometry midterm. It was almost nine o’clock when Gennie came in. No hour to be visiting on a school night, my mother observed acidly as she acknowledged Gennie’s greeting.

  We went into my room and shut the door. Gennie looked terrible. There were circles under her eyes, and long ugly scratches on both sides of her face. Her usually neat long braids were disheveled and mussed. All she would tell me was that she and her father had had a fight and she didn’t have any place to sleep and she didn’t want to talk about it anymore. She asked if she could spend the night at my house. I knew that was impossible. My parents would never allow it, and they would want to know why. I was torn, but I knew I had pushed them as far as I could with the visit.

  ‘Can’t you go stay with Louisa?’ I said. What father would scratch up his daughter like that? ‘Don’t go back there, please Gennie.’

  Gennie looked at me as if I couldn’t understand anything, but her voice wasn’t as impatient as usual. She looked tired. ‘I can’t go back there, she doesn’t have room for me anymore. She’s fixed over the bedroom and everything, and besides she said I had to choose and I did. She said if I went to Phillip’s I couldn’t come back. And now Ella’s gone down south to see her mother, and my father and Uncle Leddie are drinking all the time. And when Phillip drinks he doesn’t know what …’

  It looked like Gennie was going to cry and suddenly I was terribly scared. I heard my mother in the living room, warning, in a raised voice:

  ‘It’s nine-thirty P.M. in the night, are you children finished? You sure it’s study you studying this time of night?’

  ‘Gennie, why don’t you at least call your mother?’ I was pleading with her. She would have to go soon. In another minute my mother was going to come in, storming nicely.

  Gennie stood up with a sudden dash of her old spirit. ‘I said no already, didn’t I? I can’t talk to my mother about Phil. He’s crazy sometimes.’ She fingered the scratches on her face. ‘All right, I’m going. Look, I’ll meet you at Hunter after your exams on Friday, okay? What time are you done?’ She was pulling on her coat.

  ‘Twelve o’clock. What are you going to do, Gennie?’ I was worried by the way she looked. I was also relieved that she was going. I could already anticipate the scene between my mother and me as soon as Gennie left.

  ‘Never mind about me. I’m going over to Jean’s house. Good luck with your midterms. I’ll see you on Friday near the 68th Street entrance at noon.’ I walked her to the front door, and we ran the gauntlet of the living room together.

  ‘How’d’do, Genevieve,’ my father said, sternly, and returned his eyes to his newspaper. He did not get involved in these matters unless I gave my mother a hard time.

  ‘Good night, dear,’ my mother said, sweetly. ‘Your father doesn’t mind you traveling by yourself so late at night?’

  ‘No, ma’am. I’m just taking a bus straight to my mother’s house,’ Gennie lied, smoothly, giving my mother one of her most radiant smiles.

  ‘Well, it’s very late.’ My mother gave the slightest of her reproachful hums. ‘You get home safely, now, and say goodnight to your mother for me.’ I saw my mother shrewdly eyeing Gennie’s scratched face, and I hurried her into the hallway.

  ‘Bye, Gennie. Please be careful.’

  ‘Don’t be silly, I don’t need to be careful, I just need some sleep.’ I locked the door behind her.

  When I came back into the living room, I was surprised to find that my mother was more worried than angry.

  ‘What’s wrong with your friend, now?’ My mother peered at me closely from on top of her spectacles.

  ‘Nothing’s wrong, Mother. I needed some of her geometry notes.’

  ‘You have all day long to get work in school. You come home here and all of a sudden you need geometry notes this time of night? Huh!’ My mother was not convinced. ‘Come give me your bed linen if you want it to go to the wash tomorrow.’ She got up, laying her sewing aside, and followed me across to my room.

  My mother’s intuitions had fastened upon something; she did not examine what. She could not question her perceptions; I could not utilize the concern in her voice. How dare she follow me into my room like a peremptory reminder that no place in this house was sacrosanct from her!

  My mother smelled trouble, but her concern was misplaced; it was not I who was in danger.

  She poked at my soiled clothes for a moment, abstractedly, snatching up a torn slip on one finger. ‘You don’t have anything better to put on besides this piece of rags-knit you call slip? You going to be walking the streets pretty soon one-hand-before one-hand-behind?’ She tossed the garment aside as I gathered up the rest of my laundry.

  ‘Listen, my darling child, let me tell you something for your own good. Don’t get mix-up with this girl and her parents’ business, you hear? What kind of jackabat woman … and to let her go off with that good-for-nothing call himself father …’ My mother had met Phil Thompson once on 125th Street when we were shopping for school clothes. Gennie had introduced him proudly, and he had been his most superficial and debonair self.

  She took the laundry out of my hands. ‘Well, anyway. Look. I don’t want you hanging around till all hours of the night with that girl. Whatever she doing she buying trouble to feed it. You mark my words. I wouldn’t be a bit surprise if she bring a stomach …’ I could feel rage like a thin curtain rising over my vision.

  ‘Mother, there’s nothing wrong with Genevieve and she’s not like that.’ I tried to keep the outrage out of my voice. But how could she say something like that about Gennie? And she didn’t even know her. Just because we were friends.

  ‘Don’t let me hear that tone of voice to your mother, young woman,’ my father warned ominously from the living room.

  Real or fancied insolence to my mother was the cardinal sin, and it always brought my father out of his pose of neutral observer to the war between my mother and me. My father was about to become involved, and that was the last thing I needed.

  One of my sisters was typing a report. The staccato sound from the room which they shared came through the french doors which separated it from the living room. I wondered if Gennie had gotten down to Jean’s yet. If I got into a fight with them now I might have to come straight home after all my exams this week. I swallowed my fury and it lay like a rotten egg halfway between my stomach and my throat. I could taste the sour in my mouth.

  ‘I didn’t mean to use any tone, Daddy. I’m sorry, Mother.’ I stepped back out into the living room. ‘Goodnight.’

  I kissed each one of them dutifully and retreated back into the relative safety of my room.

  We did not weep for the thing that was once a child

  did not weep for the thing that had been a child

  did not weep for the thing that had been

  nor for the deep dark silences

&nbs
p; that ate of the so-young flesh.

  But we wept at the sight of two men standing alone

  flat on the sky, alone,

  shoveling earth as a blanket

  to keep the young blood down.

  For we saw ourselves in the dark warm mother-blanket

  saw ourselves deep in the earth’s breast-swelling –

  no longer young –

  and knew ourselves for the first time

  dead and alone.

  We did not weep for the thing – weep for the thing –

  we did not weep for the thing that was

  once a child.

  May 22, 1949

  14

  Things I never did with Genevieve: Let our bodies touch and tell the passions that we felt. Go to a Village gay bar, or any bar anywhere. Smoke reefer. Derail the freight that took circus animals to Florida. Take a course in international obscenities. Learn Swahili. See Martha Graham’s dance troupe. Visit Pearl Primus. Ask her to take us away with her to Africa next time. Write THE BOOK. Make love.

  Louisa’s voice on the phone at 3:30 P.M., tight and unbelieving.

  ‘They found Gennie on the steps of the 110th Street Community Center this morning. She’s taken rat poison, Arsenic. They don’t expect her to live.’

  That wasn’t true. Gennie was going to live. She’d fool all of us again. Gennie, Gennie, please don’t die, I love you. Something will save her. Something. Maybe she’s run away, maybe she’s just run away again. Not to her relatives in Richmond this time. Oh no. Gennie’ll think of someplace nobody’ll think of looking, and then eventually she’ll come sauntering in with a new outfit she got someone to buy her and that quick toss of her head, saying. ‘I was fine all the time.’

  ‘Where is she, Mrs Thompson?’

  ‘She’s at Sydenham. Evidently she rode the subways all night, that’s what she told the police, but nobody knows where she’d been before. She didn’t go to school yesterday.’

  Cutting through Louisa’s voice is the sound of the jukebox in Mike’s Food Shoppe. Yesterday, after school, hearing Gennie’s favorite song these days – the richly elongated tones of Sarah Vaughan’s chocolate voice repeating over and over,

  I saw the harbor lights they only told me we were parting

  The same old harbor lights that once brought you to me

  I saw the harbor lights, how could I help the tears were starting,

  were starting,

  were starting …

  Mike came over and kicked the box. ‘Albanian magic,’ he grinned, and went back to his griddle. The hateful taste of black coffee and lemon in my mouth. Gennie Gennie Gennie Gennie.

  ‘Can I see her, Mrs Thompson? When are visiting hours?’ Could I go see Gennie and still get back before my mother got home?

  ‘You can come anytime, honey, but you better hurry.’

  Rifling my mother’s old pocketbooks for ten cents carfare. My empty stomach churning. Louisa’s tears as she greets me at the door of the emergency room, as she takes my hands.

  ‘They’re working on her again, honey. They won’t even admit her up in the ward. They say she won’t last ’til night.’

  The hospital bed in the glass cubicle behind the emergency room in Harlem Hospital. Her mother and grandmother and I clutching each other for comfort. Louisa smelling of Evening in Paris that always made me sneeze. My head an endless kaleidoscope of numb images, jumbled, repeated.

  Speech class, the only class we ever had together.

  Jenny come tie my, Jenny come tie my, Jenny come tie my bonny cravat.

  I’ve tied it behind and I’ve tied it before

  and I’ve tied it so often, I’ll tie it no more.

  Miss Mason’s monotonous voice drilling us through the exercise over and over. ‘Nice wide i’s, now. Again, class.’ Gennie’s grandmother, her insistent southern voice looking for meaning.

  ‘She didn’t talk about it this time. Nobody knew. If only she’d said something. I’da believed her this time …’ The young white doctor, ‘You can go in now, but she’s asleep.’

  Gennie Gennie Gennie I never saw you asleep before. You look just like you awake except your eyes are closed. Your brows still bend down in the middle like you frowning. What time is my mother coming home? Suppose I get on the same bus as she does coming uptown from the office? What shall I tell them when I get home?

  My mother was home when I got in. An unwillingness to share any piece of my private world, even the pain, made me lie. I said Gennie was in the hospital because she had swallowed poison, by accident. Iodine, from the medicine chest.

  ‘But what kind of house is that for a young girl to grow up in? How could she make such a mistake, poor thing? Wasn’t her stepmother home?’

  ‘I don’t know, Mother. That’s all her father told me.’ Under my mother’s curious gaze I kept my face carefully blank.

  Early early the next morning. Using my church collection for carfare. The hospital odor and the muted sound of the p.a. Nobody around, nobody to stop me. The hospital bed in the glass cubicle. You can’t just die like this, Gennie, we haven’t had our summer yet. Don’t you remember? You promised. She can’t die. Too much poison, they say. She stuffed rat poison into the gelatin capsules, ate them, one by one. We had bought two dozen capsules on Friday.

  A crumpled flower on the hospital bed. Arsenic is a corrosive. She lingered, metallic-smelling foam at the corners of her mouth, blackened and wet. Her Gennie braids askew, unraveling. The last five inches of them revealed as a hairpiece. How could it be that I never knew? Gennie had plaited false hair into her braids. She was so proud of her long hair. Sometimes she wound them around her head like a crown. Now they were unraveling on the hospital pillow as she tossed her head from side to side, her eyes closed in the emptiness and quiet of the early Sunday morning hospital light. I took her hand.

  ‘I’m supposed to be at church, Gennie, but I had to come see you.’ She smiled, her eyes still closed. She turned her head towards me. Her breath was foul and shallow.

  ‘Don’t die, Gennie. Do you still want to?’

  ‘Of course, I do. Didn’t I tell you I was going to?’

  I bent close to her and touched her forehead. ‘Oh why, Gennie, why?’ I whispered.

  Her great black eyes flashed open. Her head moved on the pillow in a parody of her old arrogance. Her brows came down in the center. ‘Why what?’ she snapped. ‘Now don’t be silly. You know why.’

  But I did not know why. I scanned her face turned toward me, eyes closed again. The wrinkle-frown still between the thick brows. I did not know why. Only that for my beloved Gennie, pain had become enough of a reason not to stay. And our friendship had not been able to alter that. I remembered Gennie’s favorite lines in one of my poems. I had found them doodled and scrawled along the margins of page after page of the notebooks which she had entrusted to my care in the movies that Friday afternoon.

  and in the brief moment that is today

  wild hope this dreamer jars

  for I have heard in whispers talk

  of life on other stars.

  None of us had given her a good enough reason to stay here, not even me. I could not escape that. Was that the anger behind her great closed eyes? The skin of Gennie’s cheek was hot and rough under my fingers.

  Why what? You know why. Those were the last words Gennie ever said to me.

  Don’t go, Gennie, don’t go. I mustn’t let her go. Two dozen empty capsules. Sitting through the movie twice. Standing on the corner waiting for the 14th Street bus. I should never have left her. But it was getting dark already. Scared of another whipping for getting home too late. Come home with me, Gennie. Not caring any more what my mother would say to that. Gennie, angry with me. Telling me to go away. I went. Don’t go, Gennie, don’t go.

  By Monday afternoon Genevieve was dead.

  I called the hospital from Hunter. I walked out of the building and went home, leaving my books behind, wanting to be alone. My mother opened the door. Sh
e put one arm around me as I walked into the kitchen.

  ‘Genevieve’s dead, Mother.’ I sat down heavily at the table.

  ‘Yes, I know. I called her father to see if there was anything we could do, and he told me.’ She was looking into my face.

  ‘Why didn’t you tell us it was suicide?’

  I wanted to cry – even that little piece was gone.

  ‘It’s her father himself said so. Do you know anything about it? You can tell me, I’m your mother, after all. We won’t say anything more about your lying this time. Did she talk to you about it?’

  I put my head down on the table. From there I could see out the kitchen window, slightly open. The woman across the air shaft was fixing food.

  ‘No.’

  ‘I’ll fix you some tea. You mustn’t be upset too much by all this, dear heart.’ My mother turned, rubbing the edge of the tea strainer dry, over and over again. ‘Look, my darling child, I know she was your friend and you feel bad, but this is what I been cautioning you about. Be careful who you go around with. Among-you children do things different in this place and you think we stupid. But this old head of mine, I know what I know. There was something totally wrong there from the start, you mark my words. That man call himself father was using that girl for I don’t know what.’

  The merciless quality of my mother’s fumbling insights turned her attempt at comfort into another assault. As if her harshness could confer invulnerability upon me. As if in the flames of truth as she saw it, I could eventually be forged into some pain-resistant replica of herself.

  But all this was so beside the point. Across the darkening air shaft Mrs Washer pulled down her window-shade. Gennie was dead. Dead dead dead, a nickel a rabbit’s head.

  When my father came home, he knew, too. ‘Next time, don’t lie to us. Was your girlfriend in trouble?’