Zami

by Audre Lorde

  As I say, when the sisters think you’re crazy and embarrassing; and the brothers want to break you open to see what makes you work inside; and the white girls look at you like some exotic morsel that has just crawled out of the walls onto their plate (but don’t they love to rub their straight skirts up against the edge of your desk in the college literary magazine office after class); and the white boys all talk either money or revolution but can never quite get it up – then it doesn’t really matter too much if you have an Afro long before the word even existed.

  Pearl Primus, the African-American dancer, had come to my high school one day and talked about African women after class, and how beautiful and natural their hair looked curling out into the sun, and as I sat there listening (one of fourteen Black girls in Hunter High School) I thought, that’s the way god’s mother must have looked and I want to look like that too so help me god. In those days I called it a natural, and kept calling it natural when everybody else called it crazy. It was a strictly homemade job done by a Sufi Muslim on 125th Street, trimmed with the office scissors and looking pretty raggedy. When I came home from school that day my mother beat my behind and cried for a week.

  Even for years afterward white people would stop me on the street or particularly in Central Park and ask if I was Odetta, a Black folksinger whom I did not resemble at all except that we were both big Black beautiful women with natural heads.

  Besides my father, I am the darkest one in my family and I’ve worn my hair natural since I finished high school.

  Once I moved to East Seventh Street, every morning that I had the fifteen cents I would stop into the Second Avenue Griddle on the corner of St Mark’s Place on my way to the subway and school and buy an english muffin and coffee. When I didn’t have the money, I would just have coffee. It was a tiny little counter place run by an old Jewish man named Sol who’d been a seaman (among other things) and Jimmy, who was Puerto Rican and washed dishes and who used to remind Sol to save me the hard englishes on Monday; I could have them for a dime. Toasted and dripping butter, those english muffins and coffee were frequently the high point of my day, and certainly enough to get me out of bed many mornings and into the street on that long walk to the Astor Place subway. Some days it was the only reason to get up, and lots of times I didn’t have money for anything else. For over eight years, we shot a lot of bull over that counter, and exchanged a lot of ideas and daily news, and most of my friends knew who I meant when I talked about Jimmy and Sol. Both guys saw my friends come and go and never said a word about my people, except once in a while to say, ‘your girlfriend was in here; she owes me a dime and tell her don’t forget we close exactly at seven.’

  So on the last day before I finally moved away from the Lower East Side after I got my master’s from library school, I went in for my last english muffin and coffee and to say goodbye to Sol and Jimmy in some unemotional and acceptable-to-me way. I told them both I’d miss them and the old neighborhood, and they said they were sorry and why did I have to go? I told them I had to work out of the city, because I had a fellowship for Negro students. Sol raised his eyebrows in utter amazement, and said, ‘Oh? I didn’t know you was cullud!’

  I went around telling that story for a while, although a lot of my friends couldn’t see why I thought it was funny. But this is all about how very difficult it is at times for people to see who or what they are looking at, particularly when they don’t want to.

  Or maybe it does take one to know one.

  24

  It seemed preordained that Muriel and I should meet.

  When Ginger and I had been getting to know each other over the cutting-room X-ray machines in the heat and stink and noise of Keystone Electronics, she was constantly telling me about this crazy kid called Mo who had worked at my machine a year or so before. (It was her way of letting me know that she knew I was gay and it was all right with her.)

  ‘Yeah, she sure was a lot like you.’

  ‘How do you mean; did she look like me?’

  ‘Very funny.’ Ginger cut her doll-baby-round eyes at me. ‘She’s white. Italian. But both you-all have that easy way about you, and that soft way of talking. ’Cept you’re this slick kitty from the city and she’s a strictly local product. Used to say her father never let her smell the night air ’til she was eighteen.

  ‘She wrote poetry, too. All-a-time, even on lunch hour.’

  ‘Oh.’ Somehow I knew there was more. What Ginger couldn’t bring herself to tell me was that Muriel liked girls.

  I saw Ginger one last time before I left for Mexico. She told me that her friend Mo had come back to live in Stamford because she had had a nervous breakdown in New York.

  During the time I was in Mexico, Muriel was slowly crawling out from under the basket of shock treatments she had been thrust into. When she began seeing her friends again in Stamford, Ginger made sure she told her about ‘this crazy kid from New York City who worked your old machine a year before and who wrote poetry, too.’

  When I returned to New York from Mexico, I returned full of sun and great determination to re-order my life and someday get back to Mexico and, of course, Eudora. I moved back into my old Seventh Street walk-up and started the discouraging work of job-hunting.

  One Sunday evening, the telephone rang, and Rhea answered.

  ‘One of your cool-voiced young women,’ she said, handing me the phone with a smile. It was Ginger, whose smoky tones sounded anything but cool to me.

  ‘H’ya doin’, kiddo?’ she began. ‘I have somebody here who wants to meet you.’ There was a short pause and then a little chuckle, and then a high, nervous voice saying, ‘Hello? Audre?’

  We made a date.

  As I opened the door into the malty dusk of the Page Three, it was still early, and Muriel was the only person standing at the bar. She looked like no one I had ever seen living in Stamford while I was there. Her mid-brown eyes were large and almond-shaped, with thick lashes that outlined each eye with darkness. They peered from a high and flat-cheeked face whose paleness was intensified by the almost straight dark hair that framed her head like a monk’s cut, or an inverted bowl. Thick black eyebrows drew together like a scowl.

  As usual, I was a little bit late, and she was waiting. Muriel always seemed shorter to me because of the way she stood, shoulders hunched and all folded in upon herself. She held a bottle of beer and a cigarette in her left hand, the pinky of which sported a wide silver band, and was perched archly upon its neighbor. I came to think of this typical stance of hers as Muriel’s fetal-finger pose.

  Her black turtleneck sweater fell low over her slightly rounded tummy, clad in a pair of well-creased woolen slacks, black with a fine white pinstripe. A soft black beret was pulled slightly to one side of her head, and just beneath her straight thick hair, tiny gold dots sparkled from the lobes of her barely visible ears.

  On the bar beside her lay a worn suede jacket, and on top of that a pair of black leather fur-lined gloves. There was something romantically archaic about her sharp contrasts, and the neat polish on her black-laced oxford shoes made her seem vulnerable and schoolgirlish.

  I thought she looked quite odd. Then, recalling the days that Gennie and I had wandered the streets together in our adventurous scenarios, I suddenly realized that Muriel had dressed for being a gambler.

  What looked like a malocclusion was only a gap between her front teeth. It became visible as Muriel slowly smiled, charging her face with a great sweetness. The tight scowl disappeared. Her hand was dry and warm as I shook it, and I saw how very beautiful her eyes were when they came alive.

  I bought a beer and we moved to the front and sat at a table.

  ‘Those look like gambling pants,’ I said.

  She smiled shyly, pleased. ‘Yeah, that’s right. How’d you know? Not many people notice things like that.’

  I smiled back. ‘Well, I had a friend once and we used to get dressed up a lot, all the time.’ I surprised myself; usually I never talked about Gennie.


  She told me a little bit about herself and her life; how she had come to New York City two years ago shortly after her friend, Naomi, had died; how she had fallen in love here, gotten ‘sick’, and gone home again. She was twenty-three years old. She and Naomi had met in high school. I said I was thirty-five.

  Then, I told her a little bit about Gennie. And on that first Sunday night in the Page Three on Seventh Avenue, Muriel and I put our heads forehead to forehead, over a small table in the front, and shed a few tears together over our dead girls.

  We shyly exchanged the thin sheaf of poems we each had brought as an introductory offering. Once on the street, we promised to write to each other as we separated, Muriel going off to meet Ginger and catch the train back to Stamford.

  ‘Here, take my gloves,’ she’d said, impulsively, just as she ran into the subway. ‘Your hands are gonna get cold walking home.’ I hesitated as she tucked the suede gloves into my hands with an almost pleading smile. ‘Keep them for me till next time.’ Then she was gone.

  Something in her face reminded me of Gennie giving me her notebooks.

  The strongest and most lasting sense I had of Muriel after she was gone was of great sweetness hidden, and a vulnerability which surpassed even my own. Her gentle voice belying her dour appearance. I was intrigued by her combination of opposites, by her making no attempt to hide her weaknesses, nor even seeming to consider them shameful or suspect. Muriel radiated a quiet self-knowledge which I mistook for self-acceptance.

  Her sense of humor was sudden and appealing, with only a trace of the gallows behind it, and her frequent joking asides were insightful and without malice.

  From our very first meeting and without explanation, Muriel made me feel that she was understanding whatever I was saying, and, given the massive weight of my inarticulate pain, a great deal of all that I could not yet put into words.

  Rhea was still up as I came back into the house, whistling.

  ‘What’s making you so happy all of a sudden?’ she asked jokingly, and I realized that for the first time since I’d come home from Mexico, I felt lighthearted and excited again.

  Two weeks later on a Sunday night, Muriel and I met for dinner, and then went to the Bagatelle. Fast and crowded, it was a good place for cruising, but had always seemed a little too rich for my blood, or too threatening to face alone. Laurel’s and the Sea Colony and the Page Three and the Swing were called bars, but the Bag was always The Club.

  The first room we entered was already smoky, although it was still early in the evening. It smelled like plastic and blue glass and beer and lots of good-looking young women.

  Muriel ordered her inevitable bottle of beer so I did, too, pretending to drink it for the rest of the evening. Neither Muriel nor I danced, and the tiny dance floor at the rear of the club was already crowded. We stood in the archway between the tables and the dancers, talking to each other, and drinking in the feeling of the other women around us, some of whom, like us, were no doubt coming to love.

  I soon adapted to Muriel’s fascination with gay bars. Whenever she came to the city, she explained to me, she came to go barring. She never felt truly alive except in gay bars, she said, and needed them like a shot in the arm.

  What we both needed was the atmosphere of other lesbians, and in 1954, gay bars were the only meeting places we knew.

  When Muriel and I weren’t talking, we stood feeling a little out of place, trying to look cool and a bit debonair. Every other woman in the Bag, it seemed, had a right to be there except us; we were pretenders, only appearing to be cool and hip and tough like all gay-girls were supposed to be. Totally unapproachable in our shyness, we were never approached, and besides, in those days gay-girls were usually not very sociable outside of their own little group.

  You never could tell who was who, and the protective paranoia of the McCarthy years was still everywhere outside of the mainstream of blissed-out suburban middle america. Besides, there were always rumors of plainclothes women circulating among us, looking for gay-girls with fewer than three pieces of female attire. That was enough to get you arrested for transvestism, which was illegal. Or so the rumors went. Most of the women we knew were always careful to have on a bra, underpants, and some other feminine article. No sense playing with fire.

  The evening ended all too quickly, and Muriel returned to her part-time job in a denture lab in Stamford, promising more of her ribald and creative letters.

  I was still looking for work, any work, and the bleakness of prospects was discouraging. I had survived McCarthy and the Korean War, and the Supreme Court had declared desegregated schools illegal. But racism and recession were still realities between me and a job, as I crisscrossed the city day after day, answering ads.

  Wherever I went, I was told that I was either overqualified – who wants to hire a Black girl with one year of college? – or underexperienced – what do you mean, dear, you don’t type?

  Jobs were scarce for everyone in New York that autumn, and for Black women, they were scarcer still.

  I knew I could not afford the luxury of hating to work in another factory or at a typewriter. I applied for a practical nursing program, but was told that I was too nearsighted. Whether this was concern for me or another excuse for racist choices, I never knew.

  Through an employment agency, I finally got a job at a hospital in the accounting department, by lying about my bookkeeping skills. But that didn’t matter too much because they had lied about what I was supposed to do. I was not to be a bookkeeper at all, but girl-friday-step-n-fetch-it for the head of the accounting department.

  Mrs Goodrich was an overbearing and awe-inspiring woman, who was the first woman ever to head the accounting department of a major hospital in the state. She had fought hard to achieve her position and the wars had left her with a harsh cold manner and little tact. In my spare time, when I wasn’t delivering her messages or buying her coffee or sharpening her pencils, I sat at a separate desk near the door of the typists’ pool, and typed insurance company letters while I waited to be buzzed for another errand. I answered Mrs Goodrich’s telephone when her secretary was at lunch, and she ranted and raved at me until I learned to remember those people to whom she would speak and those to whom she would not.

  Mrs Goodrich was a tartar, a woman who had fought long and hard to make herself a place in a world hostile to her as a woman accountant. She had won by the same terms as the men whom she had fought. Now she was wedded to those terms, particularly in dealing with other women. For some unstated reason, we took immediate and deep exception to each other. Whatever the recognition was that passed between us, it did not serve to make us allies. Yet our positions were clearly unequal. As my boss, she had the power, and I would not retreat. It was much more complex than simple aversion. I was outraged by her attitude towards me, and despite the fact that she found me clearly unsatisfactory, Mrs Goodrich would not release me to the clerical pool, nor would she leave me alone.

  Mrs Goodrich told me I walked like a lumberjack, and made too much noise in the halls. I was too uppity for my own good and would never get ahead. I would have to learn to be prompt, even though my ‘people’ were never on time. Anyway, I didn’t belong in the hospital, and should quit work and go back to school. In one of our few civil conversations, I told her I couldn’t afford to.

  ‘Well, then, you’d better straighten out around here or you’ll be out on the street in short order.’

  I cringed secretly as she bawled me out for typing errors, in front of the whole typing pool, then called me across the hall into her private office to pick up a pencil she’d dropped.

  I dreamed of stepping on her face with an ice pick between my toes. I felt trapped and furious. I had gotten the job a week before Thanksgiving, and the last weeks of the year were agony for me. Mrs Goodrich became the symbol of a job which I hated (I had never really learned to type) and I came to hate her with the same passion.

  I was hungry for the sun in my days. I walked
west through Union Square and up through Stuyvesant Park to work. Coming across 14th Street, some mornings I could catch a glimpse of it over near the river, but the sun was never really up past the buildings before I went into the grey stone building. It had gone down by the time I left work. We were given free lunch in the hospital cafeteria, so I couldn’t go out at noon. It was a recurring sadness to me as I walked home in the winter evenings, cars’ rear lights along Second Avenue flickering like those on a Christmas tree. I thought if I had to spend the rest of my life working in places like Keystone Electronics and Manhattan Hospital I would surely go mad. I couldn’t figure it out, but I knew there had to be some other way.

  At work, my only weapon was retreat, and I used it with the indiscriminateness of any adolescent rebel. I fell asleep at my desk at every opportunity, and upon the slightest provocation, usually in the middle of typing Mrs Goodrich’s letters. In these mini-sleeps, I would type snatches of poems or nonsense phrases into the middle of straight formal sentences. I never bothered to proofread my letters, but only checked them as a work of art, brushing my eye over the paper for correct margins and no strike-overs. Letters would arrive upon Mrs Goodrich’s desk for her signature neatly and correctly typed, but with appalling sentences tucked into them.

  Dear Sir:

  Claim forms may be obtained strange gods worship the evening hours by writing the Main Office at …

  I had nightmares of the sound of Mrs Goodrich’s buzzer, followed by her deep bellow from across the hall, summoning me into her office.

  In the meantime, Muriel and I corresponded. To be more exact, Muriel wrote long and beautiful letters and I read and cherished them in silence.

  Muriel’s lyrical and revealing letters held a hunger and an isolation that matched my own, and a precious unfolding of her humorous and prismatic vision. I came to marvel and delight in the new view she afforded me of simple and unexpected things. Re-seeing the world through her unique scrutinies was like re-seeing the world through my first pair of glasses when I was a child. Endless and wonderful re-discoveries of the ordinary.