The SEEK Program offered challenges. Many of the students were my age, and the “bourgie” girl from Queens that I was didn’t sit well with some of my fellow teachers who were more radical. Others, who had come from southern backgrounds and Black colleges, thought I was stuck up. The fact that my academic discipline was French did not make acceptance any quicker, nor did my mother’s connections to the college administration; they just made me suspect in their eyes. It was a time of social paranoia, when everyone was constantly being questioned about allegiances and political stance, and the jockeying for position in the program often became exhausting. I kept my head down, worked at teaching, and found solace (and friends) elsewhere.
In Manhattan, where I lived, some of us formed a group dedicated to spreading the word about the Black Arts Movement through writing for a small uptown tabloid, The Black American. To say that the paper was unremarkable is gross understatement; its headlines ran along the lines of, “Didn’t God Make Titties?” and it had full-page illustrations inside, but it offered us pages in which to write and an audience. I was in charge of the cultural beat, and I would write my book review column or critique the latest show on African art at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) and head out on the A train to deliver it to the editorial offices.
My career as a writer began with those trips uptown. After a few months, I discovered that I was the only one in the group still writing. I knew that I wanted something more, so I rounded up my numerous clips and headed off to peddle my writing wares at a venue that was a tad more legitimate. I began to write for one of the new Black publications that were sprouting up: Encore American & Worldwide News. The editor in chief, Ida Lewis, had been the former editor in chief of another new Black publication, Essence, but had left and started something more political in tone. I wrote book reviews and did translations of articles from Jeune Afrique about international politics and the larger world of the African diaspora, which was beginning to interest me.
My studies at Tisch were culminating, and I had arrived at the stage where I had to propose a topic for my dissertation. I selected the theater of French-speaking West Africa, based on reading a few plays that I’d found on one of my semiannual trips to Paris, because I was fascinated with Senegal’s 1966 FESTAC, which celebrated pan-African culture. The preliminary proposal was accepted, and as I went deeper into the topic and took my written and oral exams that would render me A.B.D. (all but dissertation), I realized that there was too much material and so narrowed the topic down to the French-speaking theater of Senegal.
Research necessitated that I make my first trip to Sub-Saharan Africa, which I did in 1972. It was an amazing sensation and as transformational as my initial trip to Paris. A girlfriend who was to accompany me backed out at the last minute, so my mother, always game, signed on, got the shots, and joined me. I’d been to Morocco with my parents. In the early 1970s, after my time in France, they imagined I’d be living in Europe and so had purchased a time-share apartment in the south of Spain, another notch in the aspirational bedpost. (If they’d only shared their thoughts with me, who knows? I might have tried living in Europe.) For a decade, we journeyed there every summer for a few weeks before decamping for a longer stay on the Vineyard. Tangiers was only one hour away from Marbella or two hours from nearby Malaga by ferry. We’d been there several times.
This trip, though, was different. I was going to Black Africa. Looking out of the window as I flew into Dakar’s airport was an amazing sight. The plane, which we took from Europe, even felt different; long, lean, ebony-hued folks who looked like my father boarded in flowing garments that I would learn were called boubous and they wafted heady smells of incense and pungent perfumes. I was used to understanding languages as I traveled; my French and Spanish stood me in good stead pretty much everywhere I’d ever been except during a month of study in Athens, Greece, where the alphabet had me thoroughly flummoxed. Here, the language was incomprehensible—sibilant and guttural at the same time and completely different from anything I’d ever heard. I was in the motherland: Africa.
When we landed, we headed off to the Hotel de La Croix du Sud, a downtown hotel where Saint-Exupéry had stayed. It was a bastion of white power and privilege designed in what I would come to recognize as French colonial style: high ceilings, wide balconies that let breezes flow, and a decorative style that spoke more of France than of Africa. It mattered not one bit to me: I’d fallen in love with the continent, with Senegal and its handsome, welcoming people, and I’d found a way to combine my love of things French with my growing love of African culture. In Senegal in the early 1970s, I was a curiosity—an African American who spoke fluent French, so someone with whom they could communicate about everything from American politics to R&B music. I made lifelong friends, reveled in the culture, and researched in the archives and libraries. Our trip took us not only to Dakar but farther south to Abidjan, Accra, and Cotonou. This was unusual. Most African Americans headed to English-speaking Ghana and not to the French-speaking countries, and it was five years before Alex Haley’s Roots would forever transform most African Americans’ view of the continent. I was hooked.
I returned to New York and in the fall was back in front of the blackboard teaching students how to conjugate French irregular verbs and trying to reconcile all of my internal contradictions. Although I was very much a child of my time, I was also my parents’ daughter. They’d been old parents at age thirty-five, and they’d raised me with their own Edwardian values. I’d been through school; I had a good job. Now it was time to find a husband! I’d dated sparsely in college, little in my graduate year, and not much more in my early years of teaching; I seemed to have no luck in the husband hunt or with men in general. Although it was the permissive 1970s, my love life could have been cast in the 1950s. My first real beau, who dutifully came to Sunday dinners chez Harris and seemed to be a good prospect, turned out to be married—something he’d neglected to mention and, in my naiveté, I’d neglected to ask. That put me off dating and the husband hunt for a while. Subsequent men were either too unsophisticated to fit in with my friends or too political to accept my parents, or maybe I was just too picky. No matter. I soldiered on at the college and enjoyed my single life in the West Village.
It wasn’t all doom and gloom. The SEEK Program was a virtual college within a college and offered art and music as well as Yoruba and Swahili. There were instructors from all parts of the globe, and we had a common cause. Benny Andrews taught art; Gail Hightower, music; and Ibrahim Gambari, Yoruba. My colleagues socialized with one another, but I still didn’t fit in. Perhaps it was my growing international experience that was at odds with the lifestyles of many of my colleagues who were married and raising families. Perhaps it was my youthfulness: I was a decade younger than most of them and although world traveled, I was significantly less worldly wise—my parents’ sheltered daughter.
I did have a growing international awareness and was becoming deeply grounded in European and West African cultures. I’d also continued with my journalistic career. I tried my hand at academic writing, penned an article on Barbara Ann Teer’s National Black Theatre for the Drama Review, and rapidly discovered that I preferred the world of popular journalism (I liked to get paid for what I wrote) and so continued writing for the new national Black publications like Encore Worldwide News, Black Enterprise, and Essence. I did interviews with artist Jacob Lawrence, broadcast journalist Gil Noble, and young and upcoming art directors and actresses. I penned occasional travel articles, based on my semiannual European jaunts. I also did book reviews, which is how I found my way to Essence. My love of reading and my lifelong habit of reading several books at once made me a natural at book reviews, and so I became the book review editor there.
It was a period when publishers threw book parties and on any given week in the fall or early spring, there were sure to be a few to attend. Doubleday was especially generous, and there were receptions in the Doubleday Suite above the bookstore at the corner of Fif
th Avenue and Fifty-third Street, where authors mingled with editors and wine and hors d’oeuvres were plentiful. The gatherings were filled with those that Zora Neale Hurston had baptized the “niggerati” decades earlier, all standing around chatting and being convivial. As the book review editor first at Encore and then at Essence, I was a regular invitee because Black books were being published. The books and the book parties seemed to indicate just how much progress was being made—at least in getting the word out. All were celebrated with wine at book parties (or scotch at after parties in apartments) and rejoicing. Personal critiques were usually saved and whispered behind closed doors or over the phone the next day.
As an unrepentant book lover, I had taken to making occasional visits to the public relations offices of various book publishers and returning with my fill of books to read and review. Random House and Doubleday were two of my favorite stops. Olivia Blumer at Doubleday aided my guilty pleasure, and I was assured of copies of the books that Doubleday published. In fact, when in 1977 the publisher was coming out with a book that no one knew about, I, who had heard a tape of the author speaking at a librarians’ conference, said, to her surprise, that I’d love to interview the author of what they were worried would be a “dud” book. She promised me that if I did, she’d gift me with a case of first editions. I did and she did; the book was Roots by Alex Haley.
I have no similar bounty on my bookshelf from Random House, but that building on East Fiftieth Street treated me to an even greater treasure: a fledgling friendship with Toni Morrison. She was still working as an editor at Random House but was clearly an heir apparent to Baldwin’s throne. Masked behind her true name, “Chloe” Morrison on the Random House directory in the lobby at 201 East Fiftieth Street, she mentored writers young and old and worked to form the vision of much that is the Black literary canon of the period, introducing writers like Gayl Jones and Henry Dumas, spearheading works by Toni Cade Bambara and Lucille Clifton, and aiding in the publication of works like Rudy Lombard’s now-classic Creole Feast about the Black chefs of New Orleans. Morrison also created the groundbreaking Black Book, which transformed much of how we thought about Black accomplishments and how I personally thought about Black memorabilia. In this, she influenced a generation. She did all of this while working her own word magic and raising two sons.
I can no longer recall the exact moment at which we met, but Morrison was kind, and eventually we began to have occasional lunches at the Italian restaurant downstairs from Random House. Over the lasagna and red wine, I slowly began to think of her as an unspoken big sister/semimentor (although the eternal quest for such and indeed the use of the word was not as commonplace as today).
In my role as a feature writer for Essence magazine, I interviewed her in 1976 after the publication of Sula and wrote:
It is paradoxical that Toni Morrison who at Random House edits and nurtures the works of such authors as Toni Cade Bambara, Muhammad Ali, Angela Davis, and Lucille Clifton then goes upstairs to Alfred Knopf and has her own work edited. The biography that appears at the back of Ms. Morrison’s most recent book is brief and not at all revelatory. It informs readers that Toni Morrison was born in Lorain, Ohio, graduated from Howard University, and received her master’s from Cornell. Sula, it adds, is her second novel following The Bluest Eye and states that Toni Morrison has been a frequent contributor in The New York Times. We’re told that she taught English and the humanities at Texas Southern University and Howard for nine years. This biography closes with the fact that Ms. Morrison has two sons.
To anyone who has met Toni Morrison the inadequacy of this biography is laughable for she is much more than that. She is one of the most respected black women writers in the literary world and her novels The Bluest Eye and Sula have become contemporary classics.
I vividly recall sitting in her office looking out at the world of New York skyscrapers through a veil of green plants, yet being surrounded by book-lined walls that reminded of the office’s true purpose. I said about it then that it was “both restful and functional” and “the office of a woman whose five senses are always at work.” The conversation was wide ranging and described many of Morrison’s feelings about not only the authors whose careers she guided, but also her own relationships with them as editor and mentor. We talked about her writing process and the relationships that editors have with their writers. We talked about Black writers with White editors and whether race played a part in the editorial process (she felt not) and the need to avoid the media madness that can affect writers. (This was in the days of book tours and long before self-promotion became a national art.) We talked about her life as a single mother raising two boys and about the need for humor as a balance in life.
I have emblazoned on my brain her description of worrying with the opening sentence to Sula and finally settling on blackberries and brambles to represent the sweetness and pain of the life of the Bottom that was being torn down to build the golf course. Her careful parsing of each word and rigorous self-editing were impressive for a fledgling wordsmith. She spoke of the need to express something cogently in ninety words, not nine hundred, and proudly stated, “I realized in the process of writing The Bluest Eye that writing had become a compulsion, so I became a writer, that’s what I do. I will always be a writer.” It was a bold and challenging statement.
The interview was one of my first pieces of feature writing and one of my first outings in the arena of taped interviews and transcripts. I arrived with my cassette tape recorder at the ready, but when I got home, to my great dismay, something had malfunctioned. I don’t know if it was my nerves or my inexperience. There was a whole side of the tape that was nothing more than the silent whirring of the machine. It was a disaster. I have mercifully blanked on the rest of the process; I’m not sure whether I called her back and we revisited some of the ideas or whether I had taken sufficient written notes. Whatever the saving process was, Morrison remained friendly after the publication of the article, and the lunches continued. At one point, she even asked me to read the French translation of The Bluest Eye to make sure that they’d gotten the nuances. I was much honored and did so.
By the mid-1970s, I’d added another title to my writing résumé. As the theater critic for the New York Amsterdam News, New York’s leading Black newspaper, I had two seats on the aisle for the second night of any show opening in New York City. Theater, my first love, was another refuge, and in those years in New York City, it was amazing. There were dramas by David Mamet and works by Miguel Piñero and Ntozake Shange. Joe Papp’s Public Theater was sending drama to Broadway. There were also musicals that were redefining the genre, like Pacific Overtures, A Chorus Line, and Chicago, and the Great White Way was blacking up with African American shows from Raisin to The Wiz to Dreamgirls to Ain’t Misbehavin’. I may have given up acting for writing, but I was there for them all, cheering those trailblazers who had more gumption than I did.
I’ve always loved music as well, all types of music, and boasted a collection of records that included not only the Motown and R&B hits that would have been expected, but a catalogue of vinyl that expressed my wide-ranging tastes, from the Missa Luba, a Roman Catholic Mass as practiced in the Congo, to Leontyne Price’s operatic selections, and a few Beatles albums tucked away from my Beatlemaniac days in college.
I was a conundrum, a pile of insecurities about not being Black enough or pretty enough or anything enough: too light to be dark and too dark to be light. In those days, color counted, and I had my thick but fine hair whipped up into an Afro and wore aviator glasses in the style of Angela Davis. Inside, I still had the little “bourgie” girl from Queens who wanted desperately to belong with the in crowd—who was at odds with the socially aware SEEK Program teacher who wanted to fit in with colleagues, and who was dueling with the newly emerging international sophisticate. I also wanted to find that “other”—the man who was supposed to, if not take me away from all of this, be a partner, as my parents were. Somewhere there was
supposed to be someone with whom I could build and grow and move on to the next level. (My loving Edwardian parents had read me all of those “happy ending” fairy tales.) He clearly wasn’t on the Vineyard; there I never really fit in with the doctors’ and dentists’ offspring who barely tolerated my bluestocking tendencies. (I read too much and didn’t really do the beach and nighttime party scene. My summers were marked by books and fudge from Darling’s candy store.) Prospects in the Village and on the West Side where I hung out with my friends didn’t look good: too many married men, and I’d already fallen for that once. Queens College hadn’t offered much either. Then one day, I must have left for the bus stop shortly after Sam Floyd, the colleague my mother had stalked to ensure that I had my job. That timing changed my life forever.
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Mommy’s Sunday Roast Chicken
The southern tradition of chicken on Sunday was often respected at my house when I was growing up. It was usually either fried or roasted. My mother, the former dietitian, made sure that however it was served, it was accompanied by at least two vegetables and a salad. (Back then, that meant iceberg lettuce with a few cottony tomatoes and a slice of onion.) Fried chicken was my childhood favorite, but as I got older, I began to appreciate the virtues of a good roast chicken, and it was one of the first dishes I mastered when I moved out on my own. It’s still one on which I pride myself and judge other cooks.
My Soul Looks Back Page 4