For No One's Calipers

A FEW WEEKS ago a well-known writer requested to speak with student writers about the problems of writing. I signed up and entered the room where the meeting was held in a mood of excited expectation that the meeting with someone whose work you admire inspires. She arrived a half-hour late, coming from a dinner held in her honor and accompanied by a woman described as a dear friend whose wrist the elderly writer clasped throughout the evening, as if for strength. An adulatory hush came over the room as she began to speak in her rambling, stammering, repetitive way. After about twenty minutes of this, I broke in and asked what seems now a rather academic question. I did feel elated at having been able to get something in edgewise, but it turned out to be a decidedly minor triumph. When I finished, she paused and said that my statement had been "superb."

Now to use a Joan Didion phrase, in groups I am usually "neurotically inarticulate." The compliment was undeserved and I was embarassed at what I sensed was a condescending attitude. Any suspicions I might have had were swiftly confirmed a few minutes later. Picking up again her main themes of the constricting conditions of class, sex and race and their effect on writers, she apparently thought she was losing people's attention. Weary of the vertiginous heights of the merely abstract, she decided to provide everyone with a small object lesson: she inclined her head towards me and said pointedly in voice too loud for the tiny room, "And you for example, your people wouldn't have been able to come to Harvard three or four generations ago..." The less sophisticated members of the group couldn't resist the impulse to turn and look at me, the only black in a room of fifteen people. I found myself suddenly developing an obsessive interest in my shoes, as my face flamed with embarrassment, which quickly modulated to disillusionment, and then to disgust.

Because my emotional apparatus is a little jammed, whenever acutely upset I begin to laugh hysterically; so I suppose I conformed very nicely to her sterotypical fancies about blacks. She talked on and on, every now and then mentioning blacks while casting a significant look in my direction. Her Dear Friend was no better, periodically contorting her facial muscles in expressions suggestive of profound empathy. I marveled at the speed with which, after speaking at such length in her flatulent way about the arrogated rights of the individual, she could forget her own preachings and attempt to make me into a stereotype.

Another Third World friend of mine tells me that whenever he is singled out like this he feels he probably "deserved" it. I don't agree. I don't believe that it's my due to be made an example of in such an unnecessary and insensitive fashion, to be the recipient of gratuitous history lessons. And possessed of a formidable memory, I have absolutely no difficulty recollecting that I am black. Her expressions of magnanimity and alleged rapport enraged me. Moment by moment as she alienated me, I kelpt trying to keep in mind her wonderful stories and beautiful words, the reason I had come in the first place. Mine hadn't been the common confusion of the narrators and the writer's identities, but I had assumed, and now I know mistakenly, that the personality which spoke through those stories would be incapable of speaking to me as she did--would be incapable of seeing me as nothing but a black, a baseboard off of which to ricochet her clumsy ideological balls.

MY ANGER WAS ambiguous. I wasn't sure which I was more upset about, that she had ruined my evening utterly by sickening me or that she had revealed in me a vulnerability that I didn't realize still existed. In her stories she had written about blacks with no overtly racist edge. Now I must look at her stories again, and more carefully. I can only hope that the glib pontificator of that evening, the framer of vacuous sentences, is at odds with the humbler personality of the writer at home.

I had considered myself too old for this kind of disillusionment. As a freshman at my over-whelmingly white, exclusive private school, I took a course in a dry subject with the wittiest and most amusing teacher there. Like everyone else, I secretly adored him and desperately wanted to talk to him after class. Near term's end I finally got up the courage to approach him with a question. Within minutes he had broached the subject of sickle cell anemia. At fourteeen, I was completely paralyzed with humiliation. For a split-second I wanted not to be black. I wanted not to be black, because then perhaps this man would have been forced to confront the existence of my personality, rather than balking at my color and expediently dropping me into the first likely category.

AGAIN, AS in my encounter with the writer, I wouldn't have been so upset had I not admired him so much. Everytime something like this happens, and it has happened many times, I am shocked, and then in turn I am shocked at my shock. In retrospect my reactions have been masterpieces of naivete. Admittedly, it happens less often nowadays, as I have become harder, more distrustful and more self-protective. Very few people can drive me to near tears with frustration. Not the blatant bigots, to whom I am at best a "little black girl," at worst a "nigger." Nor can the less obvious ones, who impute my presence to affirmative action and the quota system. They lost their power to hurt me seriously long ago. I'm inured to it. It is only in those rare occasions when I delude myself into thinking that I am entering an atmosphere that is somehow benign or "safe," where I'm not going to have to watch my every word and gesture, that are lethal. When I thought I could suspend the usual caution that I exercise with whites that I don't know very well I got the verbal equivalent of a sledgehammer in my face.

What deepened my sadness that evening with my writer is that despite her unwitting hypocrisy and insensitivity, the kinds of issues that she has tried to bring to general attention in her talks and lectures, remain compelling. Perhaps she does not present the most elegantly constructed analyses, but she has the essential element of conviction that saves her rhetoric. She has, however, fallen into the habit of slinging too many canned pronouncements about complicated matters.

I know that if I were a nice and understanding individual, I would excuse her as a member of an older generation. But this brand of gross insensitivity, especially coming from a self-appointed mouthpiece for human issues, precludes forgiveness. When I enter a room I do not present myself as a willing sociological specimen for anyone's calipers.

I am not denying that I am different. I am a woman and black. Both these are but two details in the configuration of a personality as complex and confused as anyone else's. Of course my sense of myself has been to some degree informed by these factors--and I would like some day to explore them to find out why I have turned out as I have. That day is going to be a long time coming, for I am not about to explain my life in the primitive vocabulary of this ignorant writer and her Dear Friend. How can you reach people who are obliviously struggling underneath a welter of preconceived notions and prejudices, people whose mental neon flashes when you come near them, Black Experience...Inner City...Hypertension..Sickle Cell Anemia...all important subjects, and all, when treated in a simplistic, reductionist way are rendered into the contemporary analogues of the watermelon.

Some will call this a peevish jeremiad. I am quite aware that it is a luxury to feel distress in response to this type of incident. My experience is not equivalent to or representative of the problems facing most blacks in this country; it is almost trivial when thousands upon thousands of blacks are denied the most basic rights and opportunities. But I can and will not deny the particulars of my own life, and the racism which I have described, while a more subtle, less ubiquitous form than most, is only the next level up in the undistinguished hierarchy of discrimination.

NEAR THE end of that interminable three-hour talk, the writer recalled a gracious, but condescending professor's wife whom she and her husband had known at a college where she was a visiting lecturer. The woman, upon meeting her husband, a printer, made a point of learning a lot about printing, presumably so that she'd be able to make conversation with him and put him at ease at faculty dinners. "She didn't realize," The writer said softly, "that of course my husband could have talked with her about any number of subjects." I was chilled by her inconsistency.

Midnight, when we broke up, found me first out the door. I couldn't stomach the prospect of the writer and Dear Friend making their way to me with half-beatific smiles. They would have clasped my hands and nodded benevolently, gestures all too familiar, as they kindly wished me the best of luck with my writing.