Summary
Chapter 25
All the cues were there, but Rhea did not, on the surface, know Lorde was gay, and Lorde never told her. Rhea defined it as “bad” according to her Marxist ethos, and Rhea’s opinion was important to Lorde. Lorde was grateful she was never attracted to her, and in fact she never found herself physically attracted to straight women.
Rhea began to plan to move to Chicago in the spring, and Lorde was delighted to have the apartment to herself. She never wanted to have a roommate ever again. She and Muriel were envisioning the world together now, and spent much of their time together. One night Rhea came home and saw them entwined in each other’s arms on the couch. They were pretending to be asleep so it would not be awkward, and Rhea burst into loud tears and went into her room and kept sobbing.
A week after Rhea left for Chicago and Lorde did not see her for many years. She did learn, though, that someone in the progressive circles started making trouble for Rhea because she lived with a Black gay woman. Rhea loved her and valued her friendship but had to protect herself. Lorde was oblivious to all of this at the time.
The Last of My Childhood Nightmares
Lorde dreamt of running through her parents’ house, with “hickory-skinned demons with long white hair and handsome demonical eyes” (198) chasing her. She came across the sleeping Rhea and when she realized this was her childhood home and she was not welcome, she was able to free Rhea and leave.
Chapter 26
In March Lorde got a job as a library clerk in the New York Public Library Children’s Services, which she absolutely loved. She and Muriel were talking about Muriel coming back to New York. Sometimes Muriel reminisced about being schizophrenic and what her shock treatments were like. Listening to her, Lorde always wanted to cry and protect Muriel.
Muriel mentioned to her that she was afraid of giving up her job in Stamford because she would never be able to apply for a new one, because if she were rejected it would be too hard to handle. Lorde heard her, but did not understand the weight of this comment.
Eventually, Muriel moved in. Lorde knew this was a momentous moment in her own life—she wasn’t just playing around anymore. She and Muriel were serious, and made vows of forever. They loved their life and their place in New York. They spent weekends scavenging for discarded furniture and items they could rehab. They met each other’s friends and formed a loose but close group of lesbians, and maintained the periphery of gay-girl acquaintances and drinking buddies.
Felicia was the only person with whom she could talk to about being Black, though. This separated her from Muriel; it was a secret pain that she wished she could share with her but knew she could not. This was “the first separation, the piece outside love” (204), and she tried not to think about their racial differences often. For her and Felicia, “the forces of social evil were not theoretical, not long distance nor solely bureaucratic” (205), and they did not have the tools at the time to deal with these differences. Their individuality was important to them, but so was their group. It was hard for them to think their world wasn’t free of the other world’s problems with capitalism, race, greed, etc.
One of their couple friends was Nicky and Joan, another was Vida and Pet. Vida and Pet were a little older and seemed more conventional and settled. They took Muriel and Lorde under their wings.
It seemed like there was never enough time for Muriel and Lorde to talk and get to know each other’s parts before they’d met. Lorde felt she was discovering all the ways “that love creeps into life when two selves exist closely, when two women meet” (207). She could not believe how happy the two of them were together. They adopted two black kittens and called them Crazy Lady and Scarey Lou. They wrote their poetry and did not play gay-girl roles. Muriel loved clothes and was a dandy about them, and between the two of them they developed an effective closet. They shopped at army-navy stores and John’s Bargain Store and reveled in their finds. Lorde was taking the lessons she learned from Eudora—”how to take care of business, be dyke-proud, how to love and live to tell the story, and with flair” (209)—and actually putting them into practice with Muriel.
Lorde and Muriel had both been starved for love and wanted to believe now that they found it, that it was all-powerful. They thought their love could fix anything, free anything.
Chapter 27
It was the summer of 1955. Lorde supplemented her library job with trading used paperbacks. Muriel was not working. That summer Lynn came to live with them. She was Bea’s ex-lover and had nowhere to go. Her young husband had died in a fiery car crash from which she barely made it out alive.
Lynn was blonde, sexy, and in terrible emotional shape. She was the same age as Lorde, twenty-one, but had been through so much. Lorde and Muriel were happy to let her stay with them and relished putting into practice the sisterhood they talked and dreamed about.
Lorde became disconcerted when she realized she was attracted to Lynn. The three of them talked about and analyzed this endlessly, and considered their options. Lorde was hesitant, but believed hers and Muriel’s love was strong enough to be tested.
One day she came home and saw Muriel and Lorde just getting out of bed together. She was a little disconcerted but ultimately relieved, and she and Lynn also became lovers. This was a new arrangement, an experiment that was beautiful but difficult. There were spoken and unspoken rules. Lynn began to sense that she would always be the third, that this space was actually Muriel and Lorde’s. They’d all wanted it to be different but it simply wasn’t.
One night in August the two came home and found Lynn had gone, along with their $90 savings. This was devastating, as they had lost their roommate, their housekeys, their money, and their dream.
Chapter 28
That fall Lorde and Muriel took a class in poetry and Lorde entered therapy. There were things she wanted to understand about herself. She rarely talked at this point, with her and Muriel communicating by intuition and unfinished sentences, and her job requiring little. She also wanted to go back to college; she wanted a degree and wanted to be free to choose what she could do in life.
For Christmas, Lorde and Muriel went to their respective families. Phyllis had a family and a house so celebrations were at her place now. Her family knew she had a roommate named Muriel but that was it; they only knew what they wanted to know, and Lorde did not want to say anything.
On New Year’s Eve Lorde and Muriel went to a party at Nicky and Joan’s. Nicky was a writer and Joan worked as a secretary at Met Life. They were beautiful and conventionally dressed, and Lorde envied Joan’s whiteness and ability to type because it meant she had no problem getting a job.
Nicky and Joan’s parties were fine, but they were quieter and less fun than the parties held by Lorde’s Black friends out in Queens. Those were “full of food and dancing and reefer and laughter and high-jinks” (217). That night was pleasant, though, and Lorde felt grateful to be spending the New Year with Muriel.
On New Year’s Day they cooked and had friends over. In the evening they wrote in their notebooks. Lorde looked over at what Muriel wrote, which labeled it as the “Year of 1955” and had a column for Lorde, which said she got a new job, started therapy, sent out some poems, and is going back to school, and Muriel, which said “nothing.” Lorde was shocked and horrified. Their relationship no longer seemed like mutual triumphs, and she could not believe Muriel measured herself against her.
Chapter 29
Lorde reflects on how she felt like an outsider at the Bagatelle because she was Black. This place “reflected the ripples and eddies of the larger society that had spawned it” (220). The fifties were not idyllic; rather, they were really “straight white america’s cooling-off period of ‘let’s pretend we’re happy and that this is the best of all possible worlds and we’ll blow those nasty commies to hell if they say otherwise’” (220).
One of the best traditions Lorde remembered was Laurel’s free brunch with any drink on Sunday. The food was excellent, and everyone always rushed over there when it opened. Trix ran the place and was kind to “her girls,” but like most gay bars, it only lasted a year. One time at Laurel's, Lorde and Muriel ran into Dotti and Pauli, two white lesbians, after they’d come back from the beach. Pauli kept joking with Lorde about how she didn’t know “Negroes got tans” (223) and how jealous she was. It was a moment Lorde never forgot.
Most Black lesbians were closeted, knowing their survival depended on it. Others were ostentatious when they did come out into lesbian society, showing all the power symbols they could muster. Lorde and her friends were the hippies of the gay-girl circuit. Most of them ended up dead or demented, but those who survived grew up tough. She felt “all of us who survived those common years have to be a little proud” (225). Community mattered, but they also had to focus on self-preservation. She recalled that “the Black gay-girls in the Village gay bars of the fifties knew each other’s names, but we seldom looked into each other’s Black eyes, lest we see our own aloneness and our own blunted power mirrored in the pursuit of darkness” (226).
Chapter 30
Spring of 1956 had ominous forewarnings. Lorde had to stop therapy for lack of money, but said nothing about Muriel’s inability even to try to get a job. Muriel had trouble sleeping and talked to herself. Some night she stayed out drinking, and Lorde felt then that they were lost to each other. Muriel got thinner and thinner and consumed only beer and cigarettes.
One evening in April they ran into Lorde’s old friend from high school, Jill, with whom she had a lot of unfinished business. They were both “poets, renegades, and very determined young women” (228). They had a guarded truce, and began to hang out occasionally at Jill’s father’s law office where they could type their poems.
Lorde also ran into Toni at Hunter College, another friend from high school. She was a registered nurse and instructor, which awed Lorde. She had plenty of money and her own car. She and Muriel hung out a lot, especially when Lorde was busy. One day Muriel asked Lorde with a glint in her eye if she would be okay if she slept with Toni. Lorde was surprised and jealous, but trusted Toni with Muriel. She also liked how Muriel seemed alive again.
Things were okay for a time. Toni was over often and Muriel seemed better. School was going very well for Lorde, who finally learned how to study. However, one night in early May she and Muriel were hanging out with Jill, who stayed at their place late. Lorde woke in the middle of the night to the unmistakable sounds of the two of them making love. She was absolutely furious; if only it had been anyone other than Jill, she raged.
In the morning neither were there, prohibiting her from venting her rage. She spent the day in a red fury, with violent scenes filling her mind. At work she could not control herself and when she was making tea, purposefully poured the boiling water on her hand. A colleague took her to the doctor and Muriel came and helped her at home, saying nothing.
Lorde was embarrassed and guilty about this act of self-mutilation, and the “displaying a rage that was neither cool nor hip” (233). She and Muriel did not speak of Jill or the incident. Jill was not really the point anyway, she knew.
Muriel started having an affair with Joan. Summer was a “nightmare of separation and endings” (234). Lorde and Muriel did not know how to extricate themselves, could only destroy each other but not move beyond their pain.
Lorde earned an A in German, which was a triumph for her, but she could not be happy about it. If Muriel was leaving her, she reasoned, then she could not be a person who did things on her own and did them well.
She knew things were over with Muriel but still felt obsessive. She stalked the Village for her and Joan. She was dropped from summer school for not attending classes. She worked half-days at the library and made less money. This was the second time something like this had happened—first Gennie, now Muriel. She could not do anything about it; she felt powerless. She remembered Eudora’s words of wasting nothing, especially pain, and Toni was a comfort to her, but she felt like no one else’s breakup could ever be as devastating as this one.
In late summer her old friend Marie called. She’d left her husband and was living under the radar in Detroit. Lorde went out to visit her and Muriel stayed in the apartment to feed the cats. When Lorde returned, the cats were dead. Muriel had started a painting project, never finished it, never fed the cats, and the cats got into the turpentine. Lorde was devastated but knew this was the last sign she needed—her relationship with Muriel was over.
The summer faded into fall and the pain dulled a bit. Muriel moved out. Lorde would occasionally see her in bars, disheveled and drunk, crying in public and clearly unhealthy. Lorde helped at first, then turned away. She was “tired of playing keeper” (240). In the spring she heard Muriel signed herself into a state hospital insulin unit.
Chapter 31
A few years prior at one of Gerri’s parties in Queens, Lorde met Kitty. It was a hot and sensuous, music-filled night. Kitty, with her dark eyes and pretty face and ebullient laugh, came over to say hello. She said her name was short for Afrekete. They danced together intimately, and that was that.
It was the spring of the new year and Lorde had her own apartment again and was still mourning. She avoided spending time with couples and never went to parties anymore. One night at Page Three she ran into Kitty again. As they danced with each other, Lorde felt her shell melt away. Something shifted in Kitty as well. They were comfortable with each other, in sync.
They got into Kitty’s car to head to her place for a drink, and Lorde began to panic. What if she had misinterpreted what this beautiful woman who smelled incredible wanted? She would find herself stranded uptown and she might not even have enough fare for home. She felt “bumbling, inept, and about four years old. I was the idiot playing at being lover” (246) and felt strange that she was still in mourning for Muriel yet desired someone new.
Kitty broke into her thoughts and asked if she could spend the night. Lorde was amazed and chagrined, and said she’d like to. That summer they spent together, making love, buying food from the West Indian markets and Puerto Rican bodegas, cooking and visiting clubs where Afrekete sang. She taught Lorde “roots, new definitions of women’s bodies” (250). They had a lot of dreams together, crying and laughing in their shared understanding of being Black women. They went up to her rooftop, which was known in the city as tar beach, and made love under the moon on a sweltering summer night.
For a few weeks in July she did not see Afrekete. A bartender at the Pony Stable gave her a note from Afrekete saying she was going to Atlanta where she’d gotten a gig and was going to see her seven-year-old daughter.
Lorde reflected that “we had come together like elements erupting into an electric storm, exchanging energy, sharing charge, brief and drenching. Then we parted, passed, reformed, reshaping ourselves the better for the exchange” (253).
Epilogue
A year later Lorde finished library school and moved to a new apartment in Westchester. She called herself “Zami,” which is a Carricou name for women who were friends and lovers. All of the women in her life fed her, made her who she is.
Analysis
Though Kitty/Afrekete appears only briefly in the text, she is nonetheless an extremely significant part of Lorde’s sexual, ancestral, creative, and spiritual journey. It is Afrekete that gives Lorde the rest of what she needs to rename herself “Zami” and to understand what home really is. As Lorde says at the very beginning of the text, her life is “To the journeywoman pieces of myself. Becoming. Afrekete” (5).
Afrekete is associated with Africa and the West Indies, the name being that of an African goddess, the daughter of the mythical mother MawuLisa. It is a created name, with connections to Legba, the Yoruba trickster god; the Dahomean sea deity Aflekete; and perhaps Aphrodite, the Greek goddess of love. Various elements of Afrekete embody these references. Afrekete laughs a lot and is a sensual dancer. She is very pretty, with an intoxicating smell on her “warm body” (245). Her face reminds Lorde of a Benin bronze, and sometimes it is as if she came out of a dream. She has much to teach Lorde, who wrote that she “taught me roots, new definitions of our women’s bodies” (250). Their lovemaking has a spiritual cast to it, especially when they do it under the light of the moon.
Afrekete is also significant in that there are connections to Lorde’s mother. Afrekete is a mother, after all, and a strong one. There is water imagery associated with her, just like with Linda. She “recalls Linda in personality, body, and scent,” Bethany Jacobs notes, and also shops in West Indian markets “under the bridge.” Food is important to both women, but, importantly, Afrekete uses food as well as her general storehouse of knowledge for “more than survival.” For example, “food, so important to characterizations of Linda, also characterizes Kitty's and Audre's relationship…but whereas Linda has an inflexible idea of what to do with such materials, Kitty and Audre integrate these foods into their lovemaking.” Additionally, “the fundamental difference between Linda and Kitty is that while Linda can acknowledge the maternal element of her ‘laying on of hands’… she could never embrace its eroticism. This is precisely what Kitty gives that Audre so desires: a melding of mother and lover.”
Afrekete also helps Lorde solidify her understanding of what home is—not where it is. Throughout the text Lorde writes of things that feel like home—being with Ginger, being with Eudora, her mother’s homeland—but Afrekete helps her figure out that, firstly, Harlem is a home for her (she writes after they made love that “It was not onto the pale sands of Whydah, nor the beaches of Winneba or Annamabu, with cocopalms softly applauding and crickets keeping time with the pounding of a tar-laden, treacherous, beautiful sea. It was onto 113th Street that we descended after our meeting under the Midsummer Eve's Moon, but the mothers and fathers smiled at us in greeting as we strolled down to Eighth Avenue, hand in hand” [253]), and that home may not even be a place at all. Monica B. Pearl claims that “For Lorde, home is a question not only of African American identity but of sexual identity. For there is no home for a black lesbian, except in language. Lorde finds a home not in a place, but in a name: Zami.” Similarly, Anh Hua says that “in her migratory journey through the ‘house of difference’ Lorde discovers that the only reliable home is the ‘house of self,’ home as the ‘place of her most private self.’ In a national space such as America reclaiming home and belonging, for women of color, does not have to involve only physical space or home but also the ‘house of self,’ feeling at home in one’s body, flesh, and skin.”
Afrekete is significant as an individual, as a structuring device for Zami, and as a way for Lorde to make claims about not just herself but all women. As AnnLouise Keating suggests, “Recognizing the sacredness of her own female power, Lorde defines herself and all women—physically, emotionally, and spiritually—as divine. Her revisionist mythmaking offers women of all races an image of ancient female wisdom and strength which empowers them to put their differences into words and create networks connecting them to other women.” Lorde “simultaneously renames herself, other women, and the world.” The act of renaming shows that she has moved past silence into a full embrace of the power of language. She has her own voice in all senses of the word.
