Summary
Pre-prologue
Lorde, who writes this work in the first-person perspective and mostly in the past tense, begins by saying that while her father left his mark on her, it was the women in her life who led her home. There were many of these women, like DeLois, the woman in Harlem who was “big and Black and special” (5) and loved herself. There was Louise Briscoe, who died in her mother’s rooming house. There was the white woman who ran up to her car once, screaming for help until she saw Lorde was Black. Then there was the first woman she loved and left, and the “battalion of arms where I often retreated for shelter and sometimes found it” (5). This is how she came out whole; this is how she became herself and Afrekete.
Prologue
Lorde says she always wished she could be man and woman, holding the strongest parts of both her mother and father within herself. She has felt the triad of mother and father and child, and the triad of grandmother mother and daughter. She is “woman forever” and her body is “a living representation of other life older longer wiser” (7).
Chapter 1
Lorde begins her chronological narrative with a brief reflection on Grenada, where her parents were from. Once she visited she saw her mother’s powers walking through those streets.
Her mother, Linda, and father, Byron, came here in their early twenties, having been married a year. They got jobs at the Waldorf Astoria, but when the hotel closed her mother worked as a scullery maid at a tea shop until the owner fired her because she was Black. They had three children, Phyllis, Helen, and Audrey.
They knew little about this strange country, but Linda knew about Paradise Plums candy, mixing oils and tinctures, praying to the Virgin Mary, and making virtues out of necessities. She knew what people were thinking, knew about food, and knew the Museum of Natural History was where you took kids so they would be smart. Linda missed the singing that was everywhere in Grenada; America was “cold and raucous” (11). Byron did not like to talk about home, and wanted to make his home here.
Linda loved being close to the water, and Lorde and her sisters saw how pensive she would get when they would go down to its edge. She would tell the girls stories of Grenada, of her home. Lorde knew “home” was a faraway place and where they were at now was only a temporary abode. Someday they would all walk the streets of Grenville, Grenada. There lived Aunt Anni, Linda’s great-aunt, sister to Ma-Liz. Ma-Liz had seven daughters. Their home was in Carricou, but Lorde could never find it on a map and doubted her mother’s geography as fantastical or crazy. But this “home” was there, a sweet place that Lorde kept as “my truly private paradise” (14).
Chapter 2
Lorde wonders why the most far-out position always seems right to her—why extremes are more comfortable than the “unruffled middle” (15).
Linda was a very powerful woman, though that concept did not make sense to white america (note: Lorde does not capitalize america). This sort of woman was not man and not just woman, but something else. Lorde knew her mother was different but did not know why. Now she knows that there have always been “Black dykes around—in the sense of powerful and women-oriented women—who would rather have died than use that name for themselves. And that includes my momma” (15).
Linda and Byron shared decisions and all family policy. They spoke in patois to their children with one authoritative voice. Byron entered real estate and managed small rooming-houses in Harlem. As soon as he came home he and Linda would closet themselves in their room and discuss the day and business or any punishment that needed meting out to the girls.
Linda was self-possessed with an air of “in-charge competence” that was “quiet and effective” (16). People on the street deferred to her. She was no-nonsense on the outside, but rather shy and private. Lorde knows now that she tried to hide her actual powerlessness from her children.
In 1936-1938, the 125th Street area of Harlem was still racially mixed, and that meant that there were tensions. Lorde still remembers people spitting on them sometimes. It was a confusing way to grow up, because her parents always instilled in their daughters that they could have the whole world if they wanted it. Lorde even thought they were rich, only noticing the things she had that she later realized her mother sacrificed for her.
Lorde only saw her mother cry twice in her life—once at the dentist, and once when her father came home drunk.
These were the years of the Depression leading up to WWII. They were hard for Black people, but Linda knew how to scrimp and hoard, and never forgot or forgave shopkeepers who were not gracious during those times.
Chapter 3
Lorde’s sisters went to a Catholic school, which was across the street from a public school that Linda always threatened them with having to attend if they did not do well. When Lorde was five she was legally blind and started going to sight-conservation classes at this public school.
She had only started to talk and read a year prior. One day she was at the public library at 135th Street, and Mrs. Augusta Baker was the librarian. Lorde was acting up, screaming and embarrassing her mother, who pinched her sharply to make her stop. Mrs. Baker stood over her and asked if she would like to hear a story. Surprised, Lorde agreed, and the resulting experience changed her life. She knew she had to read herself, and said so out loud. Her mother was stunned and grateful, and kissed Lorde in her excitement. She never thought it possible for Lorde to sit still like that, or to be able to utter intelligible words. Thus Linda began to teach Lorde how to read and write. She decided she did not like the way the “y” on "Audrey" hung down, and began leaving it off until her mother got mad.
In kindergarten, though, she learned ability did not match expectation. There were only 7-8 Black kids there, all with deficiencies of sight. On the first day the teacher gave out music notebooks and crayons to write with, which horrified Lorde, who knew that you used regular paper and pencils to write. When she spoke up, the teacher became annoyed. When she then wrote out her name instead of the single letter the teacher asked of the class, she got in worse trouble. Lorde was so confused and did not know what she was doing wrong.
The teacher told Linda that Lorde could not follow directions and was not ready for kindergarten, which Linda knew was wrong, so she sent Lorde to the Catholic school instead. Her first-grade teacher was Sister Mary of Perpetual Help, who ruled with an iron fist and seemed to hate children. The class was divided into the Fairies and the Brownies, the former being the good students and the latter the bad. Lorde was in the Brownies a lot initially, especially as she did not know her numbers. A boy named Alvin did not know his letters, so the two of them collaborated and got out of the Brownies. Alvin died of tuberculosis not long after, and Lorde was back in the Brownies. She made it to the Fairies again with an assignment where they were supposed to cut out words from a newspaper and put them with a picture, forming a sentence. Lorde’s was so impressive the teacher did not believe it was her own work, but her parents phoned and confirmed it was.
How I Became a Poet
Linda “had a special and secret relationship with words, taken for granted as language because it was always there” (31). There were unique terms for objects that the girls and their cousins learned; phrases were well-coded, especially if they referred to the body. Lorde considers herself a “reflection of her mother’s secret poetry as well as of her hidden angers” (32).
Lorde remembers the ritual of her mother combing out her hair, and crawling into bed with her on Saturday mornings, the only day she did not get up early.
Chapter 4
Phyllis and Helen were much closer to each other in age and thus Lorde often felt like an only child. She longed for a younger sister, and knew that it could only come from magical means as the Lorde family was not going to expand naturally any more. As the youngest she felt she had privileges but no rights, and that if there were another child it had to be a girl because if it were a boy, it would belong to her mother and not to her.
She was convinced that if she had a clean soul and did the right thing the right way she could get a little sister. She tried counting lines on the pavement, or stepping on all of them, but the child never appeared. She formed a little figure out of flour and water and salt and hoped it would come alive, but no amount of spells or Hail Marys did the trick.
Lorde found her first playmate when she was four years old, but it lasted for ten minutes. It was a cold winter day and Lorde was dressed and ready to go out with her mother. She was sitting on the stoop while her mother finished up getting ready. This was the only time she was ever allowed out of her mother’s sight. She loved these few minutes of freedom. Suddenly she espied a little girl on a step of the entryway of the main doors. She was the most beautiful girl Lorde had ever seen, dressed exquisitely like a doll. The girl said her name was Toni and asked Lorde’s. Lorde knew she had to have this girl as her very own; she had to keep her and hide her away. Toni came up to her and she stroked the soft fur of the girl’s coat. She fingered the buttons on the coat and did them and undid them. Toni became impatient and asked Lorde to play with her. Lorde became afraid Toni would run away and she knew she could not lose her. She pulled Toni on her lap and rocked her back and forth, feeling her warmth. She wanted to take off her clothes and see if her little brown body was real; her heart felt like it would explode with love. She put Toni across her knees and began to look under her skirt to see if she was real. Would her bottom be flesh or made of rubber? At this moment her mother stepped out, and Lorde was frozen in embarrassment. Toni slid off her lap. Her mother did not seem to realize the enormity of what Lorde was doing, and pulled Lorde awkwardly to her feet.
Toni asked if she could play tomorrow, and Lorde kept that dream in her heart as she went with her mother on her tedious errands. It was an eternity until the next Monday, but Toni never appeared.
Chapter 5
Lorde was always jealous of her two sisters because they were older and more privileged and each had the other as a friend. They had their own room at the end of the hall, which was a sanctuary that Lorde, who was under her mother’s watchful eye, did not have.
The first time Lorde ever slept anywhere besides her parents’ bedroom was at a beach house in Connecticut where the family went on a one-week vacation. The first year she slept on a cot; the next year they were poorer and were all in one room. She went to bed earlier than her sisters, with whom she shared a bed, and waited anxiously for them to come in. That year she finally learned what they did in their room at home—they told stories. Lorde was transfixed; she could not believe people could tell untrue stories and not get in trouble. She begged to listen to them every week even though her sisters would get annoyed. Helen would force her to promise she would never say anything about them, and would pinch her if she ever interrupted. Once Helen was so furious she refused to continue the installment of the story, and Lorde was miserable. She decided she would make up a story of her own.
Chapter 6
In the earliest days of life in Harlem Lorde and her sisters would traverse the miles uphill to the comic book store in Washington Heights. There was a fat old white man who worked there who touched Lorde one time inappropriately when she got separated from her sister, so she learned to avoid him by staying close to them.
This was a long outing but a special one. They were never allowed to simply play in the street, but they were allowed to take this journey. They passed all the familiar places in the heat of the burning sun, seemingly walking forever. Lorde did not care, though, as it was a delight to be taken along with her sisters. She loved reaching the crest of Amsterdam Avenue and seeing both the Hudson and East rivers. Once she had a terrible thought that she would fall and roll down the hill and no one would stop her, and she would be carried out to the ocean.
Analysis
Audre Lorde is best known for her poems and essays, but even the reader familiar with those texts will find much illuminating and compelling about Zami, her autobiography. Of course, she does not refer to the work as an autobiography, but instead as a “biomythography,” which we will unpack momentarily. Regardless, it is an account of her childhood and young adulthood, her sexual and creative and racial awakenings, as well as a chronicle of friends, loves, and losses.
The neologism “biomythography” combines biography with mythology. Only this new category of writing “will contain all her identities,” Monica B. Pearl writes. Elizabeth Alexander agrees, saying that this invented term created “a larger space for her myriad selves.” And Heather Russell suggests that “the work is not just the “individualized story of a black woman seeking self-actualization; rather Lorde’s now classic narrative is engendered by the collective consciousness of an African Caribbean cosmology.” The form “simultaneously invokes, interrogates, and celebrates the mythic (and/or imaginative) possibilities encoded within acts of representation, always proving a polysemous cast to the ‘historicity’ of events being represented. Myth, dream, and history assume equal footing as efficient causality and equivalent epistemological value.”
In the first few chapters, we meet Lorde’s parents and Lorde as a young girl. Lorde makes it very clear at the outset of the text that this is a story of how the women in her life contributed to the formation of her identity—not men. The woman who takes up the most (psychic) space in Lorde’s life is Linda, her mother. Linda is a powerful, imposing woman. She had a “public air of in-charge competence” that was “quiet and effective” (16). She was different than other women, Lorde believed, but it was only when she was older did she see that her mother “took pains…to hide from us children the many instances of her powerlessness” (17).
One area of powerlessness was in regards to racism. Racism was an indelible part of the Lordes’ lives, although Linda and Byron did their best to shield their daughters from this reality. Linda would insist that when white people literally spat on them that “it was something else” (18); it was “so often her approach to the world; to change reality” (18). The girls grew up thinking that “we could have the whole world in the palm of our hands” (18), which ended up being more confusing than anything else. Lorde remembered, as did so many little girls of color, “All our storybooks were about people who were very different from us. They were blonde and white and lived in houses with trees around and had dogs named Spot” (18). At school Lorde’s teachers would often single her out for cruel treatment, with Sister Mary creating two groups of students—the Fairies and the Brownies—and Lorde observed “in this day of heightened sensitivity to racism and color usage, I don’t have to tell you which were the good students and which were the baddies” (27-28).
A formative early moment in the text is when Lorde spent time with her older sisters and learns that they tell stories to each other. She was flabbergasted, thinking, “the very idea of telling stories and not getting whipped for telling untrue was the most marvelous thing I could think of, and every night I begged to be allowed to listen” (46). And when Helen became annoyed and shut her out, Lorde resolved “to make up a story of my very own” (48).
This is part of her growing understanding that she is destined to be a poet, someone who used words to construct, explain, mitigate, and enrich reality. In a chapter labeled “How I Became a Poet,” one of only two chapters that are titled instead of sequentially numbered, she states frankly that she was a “reflection of my mother’s secret poetry as well as her hidden angers” (32). Linda had a “special and secret relationship with words, taken for granted as language because it was always there” (31), and when Lorde realized “the strongest words for what I have to offer come out of me sounding like words I remember from my mother’s mouth, then I either have to reassess the meaning of everything I say now, or re-examine the worth of her old words” (31). Anh Hua explains that since Lorde was a “second-generation black diasporic woman who did not experience the physical migration from homeland to the New World, homeland memory is evoked and imagined through her mother’s storytelling.” These memories are critical because they are “sites for understanding her mother’s displacement and exile.” They are also crucial because Lorde could not even find Carricou on a map when she was a child, so she needed those magical and mythical stories to start to form her understanding of her home and her ancestry (home is an important theme in the text that will be explored in further analyses). These stories are part of Linda’s poetry, and Hua observes that “Lorde traces a different genealogy of memory by recognizing black women’s creativity…[Linda’s] stories, like those of many women, often unacknowledged because they are women’s stories, unrecorded in official history, ephemeral, oral, performative, and often circulated within the domestic sphere and among intimate personal relationships.”
