Summary
Chapter 7
War came, and Lorde knew it was there because of the tight feeling in the house, her father’s tone, and the absence of their favorite radio programs. At school the students had to learn their blood types, pray, and do air raid drills. Mothers were asked to watch the skies for enemy aircraft.
Overall, though, life went on as normal for Lorde. She was very proud of her important mother, who watched the skies, ran booths on Election Day, and gave out ration books. Her father took a job in a war plant out in Queens and worked the night shift, doing whatever maintenance repairs were needed. Linda filled in for him in the office.
Over time the real estate business got better as more money came into circulation for Black people. The family moved “up the hill” near where the girls used to go on their comic book adventures.
Chapter 8
Lorde “grew Black as my need for life, for affirmation, for love, for sharing—copying from my mother what was in her, unfulfilled” (58). One day she asked her sisters what “Colored” meant and they could not quite tell her. It was the first time they’d discussed race as a reality.
Their new apartment was in Washington Heights and Lorde started going to a new Catholic school. A couple of weeks after they moved there, their landlord hanged himself in the basement. People said it was because he had to start renting to Black people, and everyone at school knew about this. At the old Catholic school the nuns’ racism was “couched in the terms of their mission” but here these nuns were “downright hostile. Their racism was unadorned, unexcused, and particularly painful because I was unprepared for it” (59).
The white students were also cruel, telling Lorde that Black people smelled differently. The head of the parish and school admitted openly he’d never thought he’d have to have Black kids here. Lorde hated how he kept her after school to memorize Latin nouns. When she complained to her mother, her mother had no sympathy and told her not to care, that she didn’t need friends.
Lorde was the smartest girl in school, though she was not popular. In sixth grade she decided to run for class president (one boy and one girl) and was certain she would win, since the voting was supposed to be based on merit and effort but most importantly, grades.
At home Lorde told her mother about the election, and Linda erupted in fury. She told her daughter this was senseless and she did not want to hear anything else about it. Lorde still ran, but said nothing to her mother. All week she was excited, knowing she was a lock for the winner. However, Lorde only got four votes, one being her own, and the bratty Ann Archdeacon won.
Lorde felt gut-punched by the unfairness of it all, and she ran home to shriek in fury and disappointment. She had thought that if she wanted something enough she would get it, but maybe she had wanted this too much?
Her mother came home and saw Lorde’s distress and immediately came over to her and asked if she was okay. When Lorde told her she lost the election, her mother’s face became enraged and she started hitting Lorde as she yelled that she told her not to chase after these people, not to get involved in this worthless election. She thought something was really wrong, and here it is just about the election. Lorde told her it was unfair, and Linda scoffed that there was no fair. Her eyes were now tired and sad.
Chapter 9
One of Lorde’s favorite traditions with her father was to bring him his hot lunch to the office. He ate in the back, and if anyone came in Lorde took care of business for him. He would give her tastes from his plate, and she felt special; these were the “fondest and closet memories...of warm moments shared with my father. There were not many” (67).
Chapter 10
Lorde remembers the first time the family went to Washington. Lorde had graduated from eighth grade and Phyllis from high school. Lorde later learned Phyllis’s high school class had planned a trip but the nuns told her she could not go because all the class, which was white, was staying in a hotel where Phyllis could not stay.
Lorde reflects that “American racism was a new and crushing reality that my parents had to deal with every day of their lives once they came to this country. They handled it as a private woe” (69), never discussing it with their children in hopes to shelter them from it.
In D.C. the family got a room in a back-street hotel that a friend of Lorde’s father’s told them about, and visited the Lincoln Memorial. That hot afternoon they stopped in for an ice cream in a Breyer’s soda-and-ice-cream fountain, but the waitress came over to them and said she could give them takeout but they could not eat inside.
Outside, Lorde was full of angry questions but her parents would not say anything in response. Her parents felt embarrassed, knowing they should have anticipated this and avoided it. Lorde was struck by the whiteness of the waitress, the counter, the ice cream she didn’t eat, and the white city itself. She felt sick the whole trip.
Chapter 11
Every West Indian woman had her own mortar and pestle for grinding spices, and Linda’s was an elaborate affair, unlike everything else she owned. It was a foreign, fragrant wood, and it brought familiar comfort to Lorde when she held it. On a few occasions one of the three girls would get to choose a meal, and Lorde always asked for a souse knowing she could use the mortar.
Lorde’s fifteenth year was not pleasant thus far. She had started high school and never got to visit her friends because her mother kept taking her to doctors to figure out why she had not yet menstruated. She never talked about what it was actually about, but Lorde visited the library’s “closed shelf” area and read about the female body, pregnancy, and sex. She thought she would become pregnant when she got her period, not quite understanding the connection.
One day in July she finally saw blood on her underwear, relieved that the waiting was over. She didn’t know how to tell her mother but purposefully left some blood on the toilet seat. Her mother seemed very proud, as if something satisfactory and pleasing to her had happened—though the two of them pretended otherwise.
Linda let Lorde choose the dinner, and she chose souse. Linda went out to get tea and told Lorde to work on the meat. Lorde’s body felt new and special, and a little unfamiliar. She began pounding the spice, which took on an almost erotic sensation. Her mother was unhappy when she came home and saw she’d done nothing, though, and took over the garlic. She began to admonish Lorde more, but then stopped and asked if her period was making her slower. Lorde trembled and felt like things were irrevocably different now, and not so simple.
Chapter 12
Lorde’s best friends in high school were “the Branded,” a sisterhood of rebels with as many differences as similarities (though they never talked about the former). They never talked about being Black or white, but did talk about poetry and boys and politics. Lorde had no word for racism yet.
The girls were proud of their outsider status, their obscure poetry and their mocking of the straight set. High school offered little sustenance to Lorde and she accepted little in the way of human contact. She saw herself as different from everyone else because she was herself, not because she was Black. Yet these friends were important, because she could share her dreams and fears and ideas with them. There were adults at high school who welcomed those feelings and ideas as well. School was the only place she did not feel like she was in a battle.
At home she yearned for privacy and autonomy. She was never allowed to shut her door unless she was doing homework and never a moment more. She was changing, growing up, and her mother found it hostile. Once Lorde confided in a guidance counselor her troubles with her mother, enjoying letting it all out, but the counselor called her mother and told her everything Lorde said. Her mother was deeply wounded, asking how Lorde could tell that white woman who enjoyed exercising her power over an “uppity” Black woman their private business. Everything at home just seemed simple and sad to Lorde; if her parents loved her they wouldn’t be as annoyed with her, but since they did not, she felt they deserved to be annoyed as much as possible.
Chapter 13
There were only a few Black girls at Hunter High School, but two more came in the middle of Lorde’s freshman year. One was Gennie, who would become deeply important to Lorde.
Lorde had a handful of friend groups—the Branded, Gennie, a girl named Maxine who was Jewish and played the piano—but they were all separate, wanting nothing to do with each other. Gennie was a dancer, and she and Lorde would play hooky and talk about heady things. She was the first person Lorde loved, her first true friend.
That year of 1948 was one of powerful change throughout the world, and Lorde’s political consciousness awakened even further. The war was over, but Lorde’s family still couldn’t get ice cream in Washington D.C.
Gennie lived with her mother Louisa in Harlem. Lorde went over there often, as friends were not allowed at her place. The two of them roamed the city that summer, going to museums and parks. They wore costumes and behaved in extravagant ways to get attention. They met with Gennie’s friend Jean in the Village, and Lorde went to their dance classes. They held hands around Harlem, whose streets seemed more alive than Lorde’s neighborhood.
Lorde was envious of Gennie’s relationship with her mother, as the two of them could talk about anything and were very close. Louisa had raised Gennie on her own since Gennie was a baby, her father having left before she was born. Yet that father, Phillip Thompson, came back into her life that summer. He was charming and bitter, and enjoyed all the attention Gennie bestowed on him. She was besotted, and began to visit him and his girlfriend, Ella. Louisa was bothered by all of this.
Soon Gennie decided she wanted to live with Phillip and Ella, but Louisa was emphatic in her no. This was when Gennie started telling anyone who would listen that she was going to kill herself at the end of the summer. Lorde both believed and didn’t believe it. It made her feel strange to hear Gennie talk about it dispassionately. At the end of August, though, Gennie cut her wrists. Her grandmother found her in time and she was saved. She told Lorde she was annoyed she botched it, but glad that Louisa relented and let her live with Phillip and Ella.
In the fall the girls saw less of each other since they went to different schools. In their phone calls Gennie was quieter than usual and Lorde thought she didn’t care much for living with her father. When Lorde visited, the feeling about the place was uneasy. In January they had a fight and did not talk for a while, but then Gennie called on her birthday. They went to the Central Park Zoo and went back to Gennie’s place.
In March Gennie showed up at Lorde’s house after calling and saying she had to talk to her. It was almost 9 PM, and Linda was icy to her. In her room Lorde saw Gennie looked disheveled, like she’d been crying. She would only say she and her father had a fight. She wanted to stay here with Lorde but Lorde knew her mother would never allow it. Lorde apologized and asked why she couldn’t go stay with Louisa. Gennie looked at her like she knew nothing. She said she could not go back there since there was no room.
Finally Gennie sighed and said would go stay with Jean, and promised to see Lorde on Friday. After she left, Lorde was surprised to see her mother looking more worried than angry. She asked Lorde what was wrong with her friend. It seemed as if her mother’s intuition had caught on to something, but she did not know what. She thought it was Lorde who was in danger, and began telling her not to hang out with Gennie anymore. Lorde protested, trying to jeep the anger out of her voice, but her father warned her from the other room not to speak to her mother that way.
Chapter 14
Louisa called the next day, saying they found Gennie on the steps of the 110th Community Center having swallowed rat poison. She was not expected to survive. She’d ridden the subways all night, she told the police, but no one knew where she was before that. Lorde could not comprehend this. Gennie had to live—they had so many things to do together. And no one knew; she never talked about this time.
Lorde went to Harlem Hospital and watched Gennie sleeping, wondering what to tell her mother. She finally told her mother it was an accident, which her mother was shocked to hear.
Back at the hospital, Lorde stared at her friend’s hair, which was unraveling from the braids she was so proud of. Gennie was awake but her eyes were closed and she smiled wanly when Lorde told her she was supposed to be at church but came here instead. Lorde quietly asked her why, and Gennie snapped that she knew why. But Lorde did not know, did not understand. She only understood their friendship had not been enough to save her from the pain. Those were the last words Gennie said to her.
Gennie died on Monday. Lorde told her mother, who knew by now it was suicide. Her mother told her not to be too upset, for this girl was trouble and she’d warned her. She told Lorde to be careful about who she went around with. Gennie’s father had been using her for something. Lorde struggled with this, her mother’s “fumbling insights [turning] her attempt at comfort into another assault” (101).
Not long afterward, Lorde visited Louisa. Louisa asked if she knew why her daughter did it, and remembering but resisting her mother’s words, said no.
A local newspaper story reported the suicide, saying Gennie was not pregnant so there seemed to be no reason for her suicide.
Analysis
Lorde’s relationship with her mother was complicated, to say the least, but Lorde always wrote about Linda and her own feelings about her frankly and without judgement or censure. She was also open about the erotic nature of the mother-daughter relationship, would foreshadowed her relationships with other women in her adult life. There are a few scenes in which Lorde does this: the first is when she remembered Linda brushing her hair, and wrote, “I remember the warm mother smell caught between her legs, and the intimacy of our physical touching nestled inside the anxiety/pain like a nutmeg nestled inside its covering of mace” (33), and when she crawled into bed with her on a Saturday morning, and when she said that “Years afterward when I was grown, whenever I thought about the way I smelled that day [the day she got her period], I would have a fantasy of my mother, her hands wiped dry from the washing, and her apron untied and laid neatly away, looking down upon me lying on the couch, and then slowly, thoroughly, our touching and caressing each other’s most secret places” (78).
What to make of these scenes? Critic Barbara Dibernard suggests that the second scene, “By taking place in the parents' bed” seems to suggest “the daughter's return to a very early relationship with her mother as well as a continuity of sensuality and eroticism for the lesbian who never transfers her primary emotional bonds to a male.” Her mother is a strong woman, and “For Lorde, the strong mother is the lesbian…the powerful, different, woman-identified woman who is ‘not-woman’ is lesbian.” Similarly, Bethany Jacobs writes that Zami does not depict mothers as irrevocably oppressed by patriarchal institutions; instead, “motherhood [is] an erotically powerful subject position rather than a position of servility.” Jacobs offers an astute analysis of the fantasy scene: “This oft-cited passage unapologetically asserts a taboo. Linda with ‘her apron untied’ is inseparable from archetypal images of the Mother as domestic house wife. Yet she is also an assertive lover ‘looking down upon’ Audre on the couch. Lorde's description of ‘our touching and caressing’ equalizes their behavior, rendering neither more active nor acted upon. Rather, they share in 'each other's most secret places.' The fantasy reveals not only Audre's desire for access to Linda's body but also her craving for Linda's physical love. Readers may or may not interpret this passage as Audre's literal desire to have sex with Linda, but it certainly reveals her hunger for Linda's love, which Audre associates with sexual love and her own blossoming womanhood. Zami's love scenes can therefore be read as Audre's attempt to live this primal fantasy of sex with Linda, in keeping with feminist psychoanalyst Nancy Chodorow's assertion that ‘lesbian relationships do tend to recreate mother-daughter emotions and connections.’”
As Lorde matured into a teenager, her relationship with her mother deteriorated. She felt she was “in an open battle on every other front of my life except school. Relationships with my family had come to resemble nothing so much as a West Indian version of the Second World War” (82). Lorde longed for privacy and freedom, but her mother “viewed any act of separation from her as an indictment of her authority” (83). One of the few moments that was actually good for the two of them was when the fifteen-year-old Lorde finally got her period: it seemed “that something very good and satisfactory and pleasing to her had just happened” (77). Lorde had been ushered into womanhood, and her “body felt new and special and unfamiliar and suspect all at the same time” (77).
Both Linda and Lorde associated womanhood with food, so it is not surprising that after Linda learned Lorde had her period, she let her choose a special meal for dinner and participate in preparing it. However, Lorde associated food with sex, which was not something her mother was willing to do. Lorde had an almost orgasmic reaction to using the mortar and pestle during her menstruation, but when Linda came in and saw how slow she was working, she became angry and chastised her daughter. Lorde, who had unconsciously hoped for something different, realized “that in my mother’s kitchen there was only one right way to do anything” (80). This is one of the first moments of Lorde realizing she is separating from her mother, also supported by her comment that “I was almost as tall as my mother” (80). Jacobs writes of this growing separation, “The early conflict with Linda sets the stage for Audre's growing investment in the erotic maternal and her gradual withdrawal from Linda's worldview. In contrast to that worldview, and to Linda's rigidity, Audre creates a new vision for herself, one that makes room for the erotic revelation that she sees in moments of sexual curiosity and in her impulse toward maternal behavior. As Audre grows older, she continues to measure her beliefs against the demands Linda places on her while becoming aware of how those two paths diverge.”
