by Janet Groth
Sometime in early autumn of 1964, Andy posted a notice on the eighteenth-floor board explaining that a young employee was urgently seeking new housing. The apartment she had been living in up in the Bronx had been broken into. It was deemed unsafe for her to return. So I gained a new roommate.
Sara Mitchell, a beautiful, nineteen-year-old African American, brought her possessions down to my place on West Twelfth Street the evening of the same day the notice went up. Sara, who had grown up just outside Macon, Georgia, lived with me through the winter of 1964 and on into the spring and summer of 1965. We were both small-town girls and churchgoers, so we had a lot in common, and we shared almost everything in those months, from cleaning and cooking to our thoughts on the universe. Most importantly, Sara shared with me her opinions about white people. They were opinions she held in common, she was convinced, with most people of color. She voiced them with a candor and a trust I had not been accustomed to from any but my most intimate white friends. And then she went on to do the same with her opinions of black people. If I knew anything about the state of race relations in America then, I owed it all to the months I lived with Sara.
I never had the heart to use the little back closet I’d reserved for Fritz, so there was no problem finding room for Sara’s clothes. There were so few of them that they scarcely made a dent. Sara had four dresses, all cut from the same sleeveless, narrow-waisted, dirndl-skirted pattern she had sewn herself. They were all of cotton—one yellow, one work-shirt blue, one pink, and one a floral print with large red-and-black poppies on a white background. For the oncoming chill days of autumn she had a navy pleated skirt and a white blouse, over which she wore a light gray cardigan. I discovered that Sara had only two changes of underwear and stockings, which she hand-washed, along with a white cotton nightgown, every other day. One pair of two-inch heels and one pair of white sandals resided next to a pair of blue cotton mules on the closet floor. A tan raincoat and a navy polka-dot scarf completed the whole wardrobe. We had a harder time finding space in the minuscule bathroom for her considerable personal hair and skin products, until we hung a small four-shelf rack on the wall over the commode. A similar arrangement—new shelves mounted over the sink—was necessary for the storage of her vegetarian products in the kitchen, mostly health foods and herbal teas.
Always clean and neat, her slender figure and lovely features meant that Sara looked sweet whatever she wore. Her hair and nails and all the details of her person were healthy, gleaming, and fastidiously kept. I did not live in her presence for long before I learned there was no mystery about it—they were looks achieved by daily and nightly rituals of personal care. And while Sara washed, or ironed, or manicured or pedicured, or applied straightener to her hair, or otherwise busied herself in her amazing regimen, she made great conversation. A steady stream of softly accented talk came out of her mouth. She made no bones about the seriousness with which she took the way she presented herself to the world. She explained that it was a matter of black pride, to put to shame with the expedient of her own example any white prejudice she might encounter about black stereotypes.
Before we got very far along in the months we roomed together, Sara told me about the break-in up in the Bronx that had been the reason for our arrangement in the first place.
“I was just sitting on the bed in my little Bronx bedroom, taking off my shoes and thinking what was I going to do next, when this big dude with strung-out-looking eyes threw up the window on my fire escape—just as easy as if it had no locks on it at all—and stepped right in and started to tell me how I ‘better not make no noise’ or he would make me ‘sorry for sure.’ ”
“So what did you do?”
“I just kept talking to him, soft and soothing, as if I thought it was natural as could be that he’d come in to see me like that, and like I had no idea he would wish to harm me. Said I could very likely be happy to entertain the thought of sleeping with a good-looking fellow like him as soon as we got to know each other. Said he should just go ahead and tell me about himself. Was he from a big family? and all like that. How many brothers did he have? And did he have sisters about my age? I thought I’d give him a scare saying I was just sixteen.”
“My goodness,” I said. “And what did he tell you about himself?”
“Oh, he had the usual sad story,” Sara went on matter-of-factly. “Mother using, had five kids by five fathers. If any of the fathers stayed around, they mostly did it to beat up the kids or the mom.”
“Did he seem to be sober?” I asked, thinking of my own dad’s struggles with alcoholism.
“Dunno,” said Sara. “I think it more likely he was a user and was coming down from a fix. Probably I would have had no luck with my grand plan otherwise. Actually it was lucky it did work ’cause it was the only plan I had. Mama always used to tell my sister and me”—and here she lapsed into what must be the way her mama had sounded when she was living at home in Georgia—“ ‘Nobody gonna harm you if you can just make ’em remember they a human bein’. You got to treat ’em like one and that’s how you remind ’em they is one. Some poor souls ain’t never had that experience. It throws ’em off their sinful course.’ ”
“And did it with him?” I asked. “Did it . . . er . . . throw him off his sinful course?”
“For a time. I can’t say it would have been any use in the long run, but it kept him quiet and sitting on the bed and talking until Jamal—that’s this Nation of Islam brother I’ve been going out with—came by and hauled him out by his collar. Then we got out of there right away and Jamal made me promise I’d get another place to live.”
I had not heard of the Nation of Islam until the year before, when I’d read an article on Elijah Muhammad.
But Sara said lately a younger spokesman for the Nation who called himself Malcolm X was the one Jamal followed. “Jamal said he’d be by for me about seven thirty. You can meet him for yourself.”
“Oh, that’ll be great,” I said, maybe a bit faintheartedly, as I was just then realizing that this little white corner of the West Village was going to be integrated whether my neighbors were ready or not.
It soon became clear that in my cool, hip building, some were not ready. Thomas Boggs was a case in point. He was a small-time accountant who lived in the one-room with a Pullman kitchen just opposite mine. We had become friendly enough that he introduced me to his sleep-over-every-other-weekend girlfriend, Margie. But that night Tom opened his door, found Jamal and Sara sitting on the top step chatting, and flipped out. Actually he said nothing in the presence of Jamal, but the next day he accosted me as I left for the office and reamed me out. He accused me of ruining the neighborhood and endangering the life of everybody in it.
That night I got home to find a note pinned to my door that said in big, shaky block letters FUCK YOU SALT & PEPPER. Sara was not surprised. She got a kick out of me—Pollyanna, namby-pamby me—calling him up and, when he answered, giving him my version of a telling-off. “Oh, Boggs, I know that was you. Just go soak your head!” Well, the notes stopped. But in deference to Boggs’s nerves, Sara stopped holding conversations with Jamal and his pals out on the stairs. Instead she brought them in and they hung out in the living room.
One Saturday night my brother was in town from California and we stayed in for dinner. When Jamal came to pick up Sara, they accepted our invitation to join us. Of course, being Muslim, Jamal didn’t drink, so he refused the wine, and Sara didn’t drink anyway, and neither of them, being vegetarian, went in for the pot roast I had prepared, with its beef juices over everything. But they seemed fine with carrot sticks and fruit juice, and we all grew very companionable. Sitting around the table afterward, Jamal told a story about having to watch a shipmate drown and almost drowning himself in a storm off the Florida coast one time when he was working the shrimp boats. Grabbing our attention from the first moment, Jamal, it soon became clear, knew just as well as Sara how to tell a story.
“Me and Jorge were the only ones didn’t go
down with the boat. We must have hung on to that little sliver of ship’s planking for a day and a night. Finally, Jorge started to cry and tell me he was slipping. ‘Help me, Himmy,’ he cried over and over.”
Here Jamal gave us each a long look. “My name was Jimmy then, and Himmy was what he called me. He was calling me for help until he went under.”
“Did you try to catch hold of him?” Joe asked.
Jamal shook his head. “I knew if I did help him, we would both be lost. I have learned there was no sin in that—there is no sin in fighting for your own life. In fact, it is your duty.”
He looked at each of us, and while it cost us something, each of us returned his gaze.
Shortly after that evening, on the twenty-first of February, 1965, Sara attended a Malcolm X meeting. She was in the fifth row of the auditorium, immediately in front of the stage and only feet away from Malcolm X, who was scheduled to speak and was making his way to the podium when he was shot and killed. Sara was traumatized by the gunfire and the ensuing pandemonium, in which the gunmen were able to escape.
When she got home, all she wanted to do was huddle under a comforter and drink tea. We said very little, she and I, but she gave me the impression that she thought some members of the Nation of Islam—with whom Malcolm had quarreled—were responsible.
The meeting was on a Sunday. Sara did not go in to work on Monday but was well enough to return to her desk on the twentieth floor by Wednesday. That night Mr. Shawn called and asked to speak to Sara. It seemed one of the reporters on twenty who knew she’d been at the meeting and seen the assassination firsthand had mentioned it to Mr. S. He asked her to write something about it for the Talk of the Town. She did write a brief account of the event and her reaction to it—about five hundred words—but it didn’t run, perhaps because she was too open with her suspicions of the likely perpetrators.
Sara and I went on as companionably as before, but the atmosphere in the city was tense in the aftermath, and Jamal and his friends no longer came as far south as West Twelfth.
Sara told me that the talk uptown was not for blaming, as she did, a rival black group, but rather for expressing certainty that Whitey, the Man, had done in Malcolm X. In fact, there was talk uptown, Sara said, that the lid was going to come off black anger, and the revolution would soon begin. Then, seeing my wide eyes, and perhaps bearing in mind my earlier confession that the only black people I saw, growing up, were in the movies, she patted my hand and laughed. “Don’t you worry, honey. I’m going to tell them to spare you. You’re OK.”
By early summer, Sara was telling me, “Black folks get sunburned, too. Didn’t you know that?” She showed me the inside of the back of her ears and the palms of her hands and the bottoms of her feet, which were lighter than the other parts of her. So we took turns rubbing sunscreen on hard-to-reach spots. Soon we moved from discussing Sara’s skin to discussing skin in general.
Sara went on to conduct what I think of now as a crash course on race. She told me of the prejudice light-skinned black folks had against dark-complexioned ones. And she said nobody gave the brothers more bad rep and cut them less slack than other black people. Anytime I asked, I could learn from Sara some new class distinction practiced inside the black community.
“How come I never hear any of this stuff from Jervis [Anderson] or Charlayne [Hunter] or Sam [Harris]?” I asked one time, mentioning other African Americans on the magazine’s staff. She put on her Georgia voice to answer: “They too well assimilated to talk black in front of you, hon. It’s only because I’m a visitor up here in the North and you took me in, and I found in you a white sister who is a Christian I can trust, that I’m telling you these things. Also, don’t believe it’s love when brothers marry white women—it’s color moving on up, that’s what’s behind it.”
“Yeah, but”—I named a celebrity—“is married to a white guy—how about that?” I asked.
“She’s moving up and he’s making his guilty self feel more righteous,” said Sara.
“Oh. I can’t believe it isn’t love, too, at least some of the time,” I demurred.
Sara just looked at me and shook her head and laughed.
Maybe not all the things that Sara believed were right, but whatever she told me, she did truly believe, and I knew she made an exception to tell them to me.
By late March, Sara had stopped seeing Jamal and had begun to receive telephone calls and letters from an old beau in Macon. In May she went down to visit him. Not long after that, she wrote me that they were married, that she had started her own dressmaking-on-demand business, and that she was not going to be coming back. In July the following letter arrived.
Jan, Sweet One—
I’ve had so much to say that procrastination set in while I tried to determine how to say it . . .
If I touched the bottom of the creek, it would have to be admitted that your ex-roomie is less than content or thriving. On the surface of Lake-Loyalty-to-Marriage I could fake it and say that things are going along OK . . .
But that [they aren’t] may be a good thing. Now I sort of HAVE to make the sewing business work.
I do hope to come up to N.Y. for a few days . . . When are you leaving for Europe? . . . If very, very soon, please call and let me know so that I won’t have the shock of finding you . . . not There . . .
I MISS YOU—and hope that you’re doing very well. You deserve good things from life—so keep on pushing.
With loving good wishes,
Sara
We stayed in touch through the next year or so, after which Sara left on a trip to India, and though I know she came back, several efforts to reach her in Georgia came up empty. I, too, hope she is doing very well. She deserves good things from life also.
GREECE: THE JOURNEY OUT
SØREN KIERKEGAARD, THE CHRISTIAN existentialist, held great sway over me, being both Scandinavian and Lutheran. So when he described the search for one’s true self as the primary task God sets us on earth, I took it seriously, all the more so since on that score I didn’t have a clue. Sara always seemed to know who she was. I was muddled, not only about who I was, but about what kind of person that person was: Nice girl? Sexpot? Slut? Crazy lady? The options were not attractive. I took a big step toward solving my identity crisis on a trip to Greece in 1965; it began with a Eurail Pass shuffle across the Mediterranean and wound up in Brindisi on the SS Carina, a night ferry to Piraeus.
I was one of only a few Americans aboard. Along with some English families and twenty or thirty Greeks, we circled like so many negatively charged ions around a nucleus of French nuns, priests, and students—participants in a national “renewal” movement they called L’Homme Nouveau.
Up on deck, I leaned on the railing and stared at the ship’s wake, wishing I could connect—fragments of myself, fragments of poetry. The line from Homer, for instance, about the “wine-dark sea.” Suddenly an elfin man in glasses and a green suit appeared at my elbow. Lifting an imaginary hat, he said in excellent French, “Bon soir, mademoiselle, je m’appelle Aristotle Caryannis.”
Aha, I thought, a Greek! Perhaps he can flesh out the line from Homer for me. But Monsieur Caryannis did not recognize his poet in English, or in French either. The latter was not surprising, since the best I could manage was “la mer qui est la couleur d’un verre de vin,” which had the unfortunate effect of encouraging him to go on talking to me in French, with a little English and German thrown in. He would speak, he said, of Prometheus and Christ: “A story philosophers tell.” It was the story of the creation of the world. Here came the fishes, poissons, Fische, beaucoup, beaucoup, beaucoup . . . The moon was up. Monsieur Caryannis’s spectacles caught the light. It was the sort of moon—neither full nor new—that nobody dwells on, but seeing it broke my concentration and I lost what slender hold I had upon the narrative thread. Suddenly there was a camel, a dromadaire bemoaning his small hump—or was it his inadequate organ? I scarcely knew anymore what was being related. A religious parable? A
sex joke? All I found it possible to do was to smile blankly until Monsieur Caryannis left me for his dinner.
It turned out that he was only the first of many would-be suitors I encountered on this trip. Mr. Phillip, first mate, was next. He spoke to me in English in the polite form—a form that, as far as I knew, didn’t exist. He told me that his four-to-eight watch was over, and while he had already dined, “If the young lady would be so kind as to accompany me to the bar, I would be pleased to present her with a whiskey and soda. There will be no charge.” Sounded OK by me.
As we were finishing our drinks, he asked, “Has the young lady from America ever seen the sunrise at sea?”
I admitted that I had not.
“She will find it most agreeable,” said Mr. Phillip. “I will call for her at five o’clock.” He touched his cap and went off, presumably to attend to the social needs of the other passengers. I wondered why I hadn’t declined, then shrugged and thought, Why not? The sun would rise, and I would find it agreeable to see it do so at sea.
I got a sandwich at the buffet and took a book to the drafty port side of C deck. The airplane-style reclining chairs were lined up four abreast on either side of a narrow aisle in twenty rows. I chose one in lieu of the cabin I couldn’t afford. After a while my book fell limp in my lap and I began to dream. The boy was standing in a garden, pixie eyes sweetening the grave expression on his seven-year-old face. I had seen this child once, for a fleeting moment, in a photograph. It was Fritz as a child, and he had shown it to me when we were still living together. The boy had become my dream son, and in my dream we were a family. Fritz and I were married. We had a car. An ordinary, not new, family-type car, a Volvo. And he and I and our dream son were taking a Sunday drive, heading north on the Henry Hudson Parkway.