A Word of Our Own: Ch 13 Lessons in Identity
Myths are particularly easy to inhabit, just patch the roof, add a bathroom. From Marcus Garvey to Nathalie Clifford Barney to me.
A Word of Our Own: A Memoir of Bodies, Language, and Home—Meditations on my homo female life (in-progress since 2017, the book, not my life).
Thank you for reading!
13. Lessons in Identity
What will you do to belong? Have a home? Will you continue to search? Amputate the extraneous? Or reject Plato’s tumbling sphere for another shape altogether, or none, take root where and what you are, grow wings? Myths are particularly easy to inhabit, just patch the roof, add a bathroom. Born in Jamaica, Marcus Garvey created a palace out of that word Africa. I imagine him tossing in bed, turning it around in his mind like a novelist. Like a painter. He’d never been, but could still see, smell, taste it. Marvel at the traces of it in his skin.
And when he moved to the U.S., pre-TV, pre-internet, with no facts to stand in his way, he actually declared himself president of it, waved it like a flag to rally the troops, inspire parades of proud black men to march under his Universal Negro Improvement Association banners in the costumes of warriors, judges, and kings (though women preferred the movement of Father Divine.) The spark caught, and a poet from Joplin, Missouri burst into song, “I’ve known rivers ancient as the world and older than the flow of human blood in human veins. My soul has grown deep like the rivers. I bathed in the Euphrates. I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to sleep. I looked upon the Nile and built pyramids above it…”
Across the ocean, meanwhile, in Paris, a bright-eyed woman from Dayton, Ohio dreamed her own dreams. Hers were of an island, a small Greek one, where girls gathered, wrote poetry, fucked, were free from obligations to marry, reproduce and labor. Even as a teenager on her first trip to Paris when she decided to court the most famous courtesan in the city by pitching woo in a pageboy’s outfit, she declared herself a messenger of love sent by Sappho.
And returning to Paris, all her long life Nathalie Clifford Barney would write and re-write Sappho’s history in poems and essays and plays imagining a flesh-and-blood woman who lived and breathed and laughed and grieved and fucked and wrote such amazing poems that only a man could transform that life into the milquetoast figure we’re saddled with now, crowning the Wikipedia page with her flowing Victorian gown rather than the inspiration for a sometimes earnest, sometimes raucous community which, as the lonely Radclyffe Hall put it, became “a kind of lighthouse in a storm-swept ocean.” Still, I am tempted to write something about the Mória Refugee Camp that sprung up in Lesbos in 2013, and was one of the worst places on earth until it burned down seven years later, though why would I? How could she know?
Why shouldn’t she dream her dream of Lesbos while Garvey sits in Harlem dreaming his of Africa? Stories are how we make sense of the world. And protect us from it. Let us pull on the mask of Mary Beton and Seton. Recount the story of a dead writer’s genius sister, Judith, rather than our own. Even here, this voice I offer, I’m sure you’ve noticed, is a kind of shield.
Me, I only lasted a year in grad school. And lost touch with almost everyone except Amy, the Women and Performance lesbian whom I’d been dating. After a detour to Cincinnati trying to figure out what to do and where to go and who to be after the school year was out, I returned, found a studio on Grand Street, and would put on my panty hose and a skirt, pleather pumps, and head off to temp jobs in half-abandoned offices, or in my holey shoes visit shops in nearby Chinatown, staring at the fruit that had spikes but no names I knew, the fish swimming in tanks and slime on the stinky sidewalks from the melting ice holding the fillets, the women in their patterned blouses and differently patterned pants haranguing the men in their blues and greys.
Uptown, I saw brown and black and white women who were secretaries like my mom but did not smile and titter nervously. Instead, they strode down the street with a skirt and sneakers, putting on their fancy shoes when they got to work as they had done since a big transit strike a few years before, when they found themselves walking for miles from their homes in the boroughs of Queens or Brooklyn into Manhattan for their jobs.
In Williamsburg, Brooklyn where, except for a small pocket of Hassidic Jews, I was the only whitish person for blocks, there were women who were every shade of brown who were remarkable to me for how they walked down the street swinging their ample hips, not as sexual preening, mostly, but in a comfort with their bodies so unlike the white women I knew back home who were told they had to be thin as a twig, as invisible as Twiggy, and tried to shrink and hide their curves. Tamp down desire. They ate in secret. Grew fat. Were made ugly, not by size, but by vast swaths of cheap polyester and shame.
The Latinas I saw weren’t burdened by it. I longed for their ease. If a man harassed them on the street, they had an answer ready. A joke, a sneer. Living there briefly I began to eat boiled Uncle Ben’s rice and Goya beans and plantains. Spoke Spanish with my neighbors. Asked myself why I should be ashamed. Why did I have to shrink or to grow? Or slink away into the margins and the shadows? I listened to salsa through my thin, thin walls. Changed the lisping Castilian accent I’d learned in school to be more Caribbean. You could say I forgot myself. Imagining myself a part of the community I walked through. And when I finally looked in a mirror, months later, was shocked at the pasty white pallor of my Anglo skin. My thin lips and tiny nose. Shocked, but also interested, at how malleable, in some ways, my self was. The magic of sympathy. It’s temporary grace.
My girlfriend Amy was my guide to the city. She grew up in Pennsylvania, but had a Southern grandmother and was deep into Bluegrass then. Once, she took me to a concert of local musicians at the South Street Seaport where we sat on our blanket among these spiffy, well-fed Yuppies sipping rosé, while other Yankees sawed away on stage, one of them an NYU professor, and I flashed back to my skinny sarcastic uncle playing his fiddle, and that time my college lover Kay had taken me into the mountains to meet her family, and one night we’d gone to a concert at the football field at the local high school and everybody was there in their best clothes, clogging away to the Bluegrass Boys while Bill Monroe sang with his high lonesome voice, and kids ran around drinking grape soda and orange crush, the mountains behind them, and around them and in them. You could smell the grass and the limestone, the minerals in the earth. Hear in the music the twang of their voices, the longing for home from the people so often forced to leave it to find jobs, if they didn’t want to descend into the mines, or starve.
It was strange to hear it in New York, with masts rising from the harbor, smelling the sea, played by people who introduced the songs in the wrong accent. Listened to by those who had never lacked for anything. Had clear skin and good teeth. Nice clothes. Good jobs that wouldn’t kill them. It made me angry, made me sad. How I’d lost my home. I thought the top of my head would pop right off, especially when the fiddler kept messing up. They hadn’t rehearsed enough. Weren’t precise at all, though the music requires it. It was disrespect I thought. Arrogance. I was so far from home. On the subway they advertised Kentucky quilts. Get yours now, a piece of history. Authenticity you can put a price on. I retrenched myself. Even if I’d mostly played Vivaldi, not Turkey in the Straw like my Uncle Earl, “When you gonna put a dress on? What fella’s gonna want you if you’re the one wearin’ the pants?”
My grandmother made quilts for all us granddaughters, something for the marriage bed. When she died, my mother held mine hostage. I don’t know what changed her mind, how that gaudy thing with the fuchsia border ended up in New York gracing the bed of two lesbians. When we left, I imagined there was no room for such a thing in our boxes and bags, those scraps of clothes my grandparents wore, and gave it to a Cuban friend a few blocks further east. What have I done?
Amy also took me to a bookstore called Judith’s Room in the West Village whose streets didn’t follow the grid of the rest of the city so I always got lost trying to find it again, and afterwards would go to the Hudson river, and stare at the water and breathe deep. Under the pollution coming from the West Side Highway, the muddy fish perfume smelled like a muddy creek where little girls might look for crawdads, jump off Big Rocks. In Judith’s Room, there were books of course, and bulletin boards so you could find a roommate or a cat or a ride to the latest festival. They had both Off Our Backs, a feminist mag with an anti-porn stance, and On Our Backs, another feminist mag which I think was for it, or was, in fact erotic in nature.
I remember going to a reading by Minnie-Bruce Pratt and Dorothy Allison and sitting on a hard chair among other women on hard chairs listening to Southern voices which were like mine then. They celebrated women, which I still didn’t quite understand was almost always code for lesbian. Was it Minnie-Bruce who talked about losing her children when she came out as a lesbian? Was it Dorothy Allison who told a story about this butch, who, surrounded by a group of bikers who poured gasoline over her, and were going to burn her alive, but she tells them all to fuck right off and sets herself alight before they can do it.
For my birthday, Amy gave me Allison’s book Trash. I read it like history. Herstory. The stories of long lost relations, her Great-grandmother Shirley, “the meanest woman that ever left Tennessee” kin to my own Kentucky mom. The dyke world she sketched more interesting, more dangerous, and heroic, too, than what I’d imagined. Where there was room for rage and shame, desire, room for the likes of a young, angry almost lez poet from Kentucky. The word waited patiently for me like a stone in a field. Lesbian.
One day I sat down and wrote a letter coming out to my mother, saying I was bi, and had a really great girlfriend—Amy. I told her I wanted her to be happy for me, and suffered waiting for a response. Criss-crossed the city. Avoided the streets which flooded downtown when it rained, not even sparing the chic boutiques. I walked more along the Hudson. Lost my mind that day I opened the mailbox and it was there. Her letter of tiny handwritten words. Which accused me of being a prostitute because I moved so often, had so many addresses. She also declared that she didn’t want to hear from me again—at all— until I was the girl God wanted me to be. Not particularly in His Image but hers, het and chaste in a handmade paisley skirt, and blouse with pussybows like the one she wore to her new secretarial job at the University of Louisville.
Like a lover breaking up with me, she enclosed all the letters I’d ever written tied up in a ribbon. From girl scout camp and college. I took them to the sink and burned them like a bridge. I wished I’d sent her a photo from my performance, lipstick smeared on lips, eyeshadow blackening my eyes which were enormous in my ineptly, blindly shaved skull, the skirt she’d wanted me to wear to graduation, and hadn’t.
It staggered me, a knockout punch to a glass chin.
Do you wonder why it took me so long to know I was a dyke? Why I was afraid of women? My god, my sisters, mom, their sudden rages, the wounds they inflected as casually as anything. As Ti-Grace Atkinson said, “Sisterhood is powerful. It kills. Mostly other sisters.” And yet. And yet. I was like some bad cat meme, purring and purring at the door to be let out or be let in, but when the human opens it, just standing there in indecision, resuming my meowling again when the human leaves. Let me out, let me in.
After that letter from my mom, I was even more desperate for a home, a name, a word. For the first time, I began to consciously shape my Self, my Identity. Was aware when I exaggerated my hillbilly roots, like my drawl. Inserting myself where I wasn’t wanted—in our imaginary South. I bored new friends with stories about my grandmother who’d hoed corn, pickled cabbage before she worked in the factory in the city, though the woman herself I avoided.
“Why don’t you come live with me?” she asked when I called her. The letters she wrote were pathetic. She was getting older, needy. She wheedled and whined. “You can have my car. Please.”
“I can’t. I’m sorry. I like it in New York.”
My father’s citydwelling side of the family I erased entirely, especially Dad’s stepmother who said I looked like a refugee, and refused to let my grandfather see me after I came out. Yeah, screw them. My mother’s parents were the ones who babysat us. Drug us to the countryside where we pissed in outhouses until the indoor plumbing finally got installed. I got lost in the corn, stepped in cow pies. Even in Cincinnati, they’d made fun of me for coming from across the river in Kentucky, “Hillbilly! Hick! My god, she’s wearing shoes.”
I’ll be what you want me to be, hide myself in the words, white trash, a hillbilly, hickster in New York.
Stay tuned for…
Ch 14…
To read previous chapters, check out A Word of Our Own: A Memoir of Bodies, Language, and Home.
xoxo K