Notes from a Black Woman's Diary Read online

  Then we’d come home for dinner, walk through the door all giggles. I’ve brought R home for dinner! The children would come squealing forward. Marsha would coax him straight to the piano and, while he played, begin a rakish dance. Emma would drift in playing her recorder, with Roberto swift on her heels, banging away on his newest percussive device—drums, cymbals, congas, tom-toms (since the dawn of his childhood Roberto grooved on tapping out his thoughts). Even you had no strenuous objection to R’s hovering presence. His enigmatic posture was almost a story in itself. Ah! I confess a longing for those simple-minded days, when life seemed an endless mechaieh! R played and sang. Marsha danced. Roberto tapped and hummed along. Emma sat lotus-like, drawing on the vibes. With you on the couch smoking your pipe, while I applauded from beginning to end (there is no appropriate moment to show appreciation). Then R would drift into some clairvoyant melody . . .

  Sometimes when it’s sunny

  You can watch heat rise

  Cast a perfect shadow

  Over our demise

  Colors of a rainbow

  In a gloomy sky

  Keep the day from falling

  Into sad disguise

  Winter chill remembered

  On a hot spring day

  Causes one to shiver

  Tremble with dismay

  Who can call us strangers

  Who saw our joy

  Only nonbelievers

  Speak of broken toys

  Sweet, sweet R. Strange that he should be the one to bring Lollie into our house. The pied piper called the tune, and in she walked.

  III

  Notes from a Black Woman’s Diary

  December 27, 1975

  I often wonder if keeping a notebook, a diary of what transpired yesterday and the day before yesterday, isn’t a very vain activity, a bad habit I picked up from some indolent soul with time to spare. Yet I am not an indolent soul. And I do not have much time to spare. But I keep a diary. Going back, back, back. And when I re-read parts of it, a feeling of solidity takes hold of me. If it is also well written and manages to go to the heart of the moment as I lived it, leaving me free, now, to recall it with all its contours intact, then I feel great satisfaction. As if I had accomplished something significant. Here, for example, is an entry written when my son was born . . .

  November 17, 1972

  For just a few minutes, there, in the delivery room, the doctor and I came face-to-face with each other. All our strengths and weaknesses hanging in the balance, suspended between this new life that stubbornly resisted an easy birthing. I, howling like a bull, feared I had come to the limit of my strength before I could suck this creature out into the open. The doctor, cursing my weakness, refused to listen to my pain, a pain that is like none other on the face of the earth. I swear it: it is as if your whole body were being ripped inside out hour after agonizing hour. And then it was all obliterated in a second, as I leaned forward to see the head and the shoulders and the bowled-up legs come out of me. From somewhere, somehow, beyond me came one last push, lasting and lasting until my child had cleared the light of day.

  That child is now three years old. But sometimes, on a winter night, when no other reading material satisfies me, I find myself going back over entries like that, as if the writing had given the experience an autonomous existence. It is still my experience and yet abstracted, separated, existing in a place that has a larger meaning.

  Where did this note-keeping habit come from? I have always liked to read memoirs, autobiographies, biographies; always been interested in the inner life. It is true that with age this habit is diminishing—as if, with age, my life is sufficient material unto itself and doesn’t require any further comparison with other lives. But this is very recent. When I was younger I devoured them—indiscriminately—concerned, at first, only with the person’s love life: the great love of their existence . . . how it turned out, what joy and sorrow it brought . . . I think I was preparing myself for a great love, storing up information on how to behave when it finally came along . . . But then, one spring, I find this entry . . .

  April 10

  These past few months, I have stopped thinking of my life in terms of a man, stopped holding up in front of me some secret myth of union. And accepted head-on my capacity to live well on my own.

  When I go back to that entry and the others that surround it, I can pick up the flavor of a new beginning. I recall when I first realized that I might have inside me the capacity to reap a great deal on my own.

  So when the “love interest” subsided, I turned to memoirs for strength, just as if I were asking someone to show me, show me how to fight loneliness and anxiety and fear and insecurity. Show me how to come to terms with my life. And last year I find this entry . . .

  January 23

  I have made my way clear of loneliness and guilt by simply being. By simply refusing to accede to self-pity. I have made my way clear to a certain plateau that has nothing to do with happiness or even peace, simply with a kind of mute taking stock and holding myself to the present moment.

  Re-reading that, I recall the winter when I decided to live. Regardless.

  It is worth examining the reasons why anyone keeps a diary. The most general reason probably has something to do with making the moments count, giving them some weight and substance, so that they do not slip by unattended. Often, when I have gone back to an entry, I have been very glad I wrote it down, knowing that otherwise I might have lost it. For example, a short one-liner I ran across the other day . . .

  October 11

  Death marks the end of living in the future.

  A note that reminds me of long talks with a very close friend whose husband committed suicide. When she tried to explain to me what was the hardest thing for her to face, she came to see that it was the absence of any future possibilities. With separation, divorce, or a long absence, there is still hope that the future will bring a reconciliation or a return. But death marks the end of living in the future. And this, for her, was almost unbearable.

  There are random notes that still intrigue me, giving as they do the impression of a moment or the playful exploration of a feeling or an idea. Notes like . . .

  September 9

  They’re selling an old medieval house on Mason’s Road, where the rooms go on endlessly, like a labyrinth. We went there on Saturday and bought five red chairs for the kitchen.

  September 16

  A lovely conversation with B. I was describing how the emptiness of the house, the absence of furniture and furnishings, is depressing me. He replied: “Oh, we’ll find a dream for that, too! I’ll come over in my trench coat; we’re somewhere in Russia, along the Black Sea in winter. With only our candles and a fire . . . do you have a fireplace? Good . . . that’s all we need . . . We’ll turn the emptiness into a bleak Russian night for the soul . . . how’s that, baby?”

  December 12

  It is our disappointments that mold us the most.

  October 26

  B made a bright red swing for the kids, which he hung from a pine tree.

  November 17

  The difference between the white men I have known intimately and the black men I have known intimately: their emotional accessibility. In white men (I think this is true of the women, too), it is an immense struggle to make contact with their emotional center, to feel them out and touch some kind of base. With black men, while the behavior may be complex, contradictory, often inexplicable, the emotional core is extremely accessible, wonderfully readable, radiating an incredible warmth. I think of B . . . , of H . . . , of N . . . , of G . . . Whereas with D . . . or JW . . . or C . . . there is an inaccessibility that exercises an entirely different fascination. It is precisely their unreadableness that is provocative. Still, all the men I have cared deeply about seem to share one thing in common, regardless of race: a remarkable masculine self-possession before which I do nothing but yield.

  October 26

  I am stern with my children. Somet
imes my sternness surprises me.

  March 5

  Making love one night last week, for the first time I became conscious of my warmth as a woman. The feeling that there were wonderful secrets inside me . . . there . . . for whoever wanted to listen, really listen . . .

  November 19

  It rained hard today. After lunch I sat in the kitchen sipping a can of beer. The beer made me very sleepy, so I came in to take a nap. It was one of those deep naps, where the wind and the rain conspire to take you into a deep, secure slumber. Every muscle goes limp. You awaken, as you awaken sometimes after really good lovemaking: spent, but incredibly rested and content.

  February 8

  Riding in the car, the day was suddenly dreary, bleak. And life seemed monotonous and sad. I wanted to cry. It seems that I have watched enough winters come in, turned the clocks back enough times, watched the rain turn the world black too many days. Only my children really hold me to life. They give me the patience to wait it out for a new day.

  January 13

  On my desk sits a photograph taken in the ’30s of several young women gathered for some festive occasion. They are all in their twenties, all the daughters of prominent black families. They are smiling, some holding hands. One of them is to become my mother. Another is to become the mother of my first lover . . .

  January 23

  The extremism, the tenacity in me. I will hold on. I will to hold on. Until all the cards have been played.

  February 24

  On the phone with B . . . over an hour, about men and women. In the end I am close to tears, recognizing that all the things we take so personally, all the things we suffer over so dreadfully, have so little to do with us. I try to describe to him the terror I feel in the face of a man’s freedom, the boundless arbitrariness of it. How ruthless it can be in pursuit of itself. Men become themselves out of a refusal of certain kinds of limitations, women out of an acceptance of them. Women are bound. They must come to terms with a whole centrifugal force of taboos that they cannot violate without doing severe violence to themselves. We are in bondage to life. A woman’s life is a terrible thing. Make no mistake about it. And I believe in liberation, but I don’t believe it is at all the thing we think it is.

  March 18

  We can’t fight time. We can’t get over anything faster than we’re supposed to. Whatever we have to live through we have to live through until its time is up. I’m saying all this to say that I think my present sense of clarity is not my victory, but time’s.

  And so it goes. As if the words could weight down the fleetingness and force it to exist in some more physical, more irrevocable way.

  But I don’t think that explains it all. If it is only vanity that makes me write, it is a more full-fledged, more encompassing vanity than those entries would betray. Because the diary is also an effort to justify the choices I’ve made, the ??? of life I’ve chosen. As if I am explaining myself against some later moment when I am to be judged . . .

  April 11

  I could have occupied myself with race all these years. The climate was certainly ripe for me to have done so. I could have explored myself within the context of a young black life groping its way into maturity across the rising tide of racial affirmation. I could have done that. After all, I’m a colored lady. My father died a somewhat broken colored death. My mother ended it all at my birth. And my second mother practiced a far too studied gentility. But I didn’t do that. No, I turned far inside, where there was only me and love to deal with. I turned far inside till I could measure every beat of love—love living on sex, love emptied of sex, love scratching and screaming in jealousy, love neglected until it turned itself into a life so solitary there was almost no way out. Instead of dealing with race I went in search of love . . . and what I found was a very hungry colored lady.

  July 19

  There is no such thing as a helpless black woman (even M . . . , who plays the helpless creature, plays it to D’s whiteness, plays it to his white ideas about women . . . ). There is no cultural conditioning, no unspoken expectation anywhere, that would allow me to believe I could afford to be helpless. The attitude of helplessness, of dependence, is foreign to me, based on assumptions that are alien to my upbringing. There was only one dominant theme in my childhood: holding on, no matter what . . . shifting and turning and choreographing and juggling and manipulating life to stay inside it! To live! And perhaps even grow! If a man came along . . . all right, so much the nicer . . . But the game goes on, the necessity to be a self goes on. I don’t know how to be helpless. I don’t know how not to make things work.

  October 12

  It is all about an urge, a powerful and overwhelming urge, to fulfill myself, to fulfill this life that is inside me, to fulfill it in every way, leaving nothing untapped. That is what it is all about: the excesses, the anxiety, the restlessness, the pain, carrying around in me this irrepressible need to fulfill myself in every way possible.

  Sometimes I know I go places in the diary that take my breath away. As if there were someone else living inside me with her own determined will to see and speak clearly. Because I don’t write to protect myself or to say things I don’t dare say to others. I don’t cater to any pampered image of myself as a too sensitive soul for whom the world is too much and the diary her only friend. I am neither too fragile nor too sensitive. I have many true friends, and the betrayals I have known I have asked for. I don’t write to hide from the world.

  If I write because of some illusion, it is not that illusion. But I think there is another one. Once on the phone with a friend, she made a comment about me that caused me to pick up my notebook as soon as I hung up . . .

  January 17

  On the phone with S . . . her perception about how a thing is true in my head long before it has any concrete reality. True! I live way ahead of myself in some ways, seeing things long before it is their time to come into being. It even makes me lie, caught in a wave that takes me beyond myself, inside another moment not yet fully conceived. That is the basis of all my lies, all my really fantastic lies. But there is more to it than that. There is also a reluctance to bore, to be found dull and sad; so I spin my little webs to hold others at arm’s length. I know the moment when another’s pain becomes tedious. I know the tolerance level of compassion, how thin it is, how rapidly it dissolves. We must dignify our sadness. We must wrap ourselves in some thread, some magical spell that allows others to see us as we’d like to be! I know it isn’t true! But it has a pale, incomplete, and somewhat fragile virtue: it distracts! And look how much better everyone breathes with a little distraction, a little appearance for fantasy’s sake. But oh, dear God, don’t punish me for my lies, don’t punish me for putting the cart before the horse. Because if it turns out that no one will ever love me for what I am, at least people will have loved me for what they thought I was . . . And it may be, finally, that I was the most terrible kind of realist.

  I begin to think I write to keep control of the present. And when I’m not interested in the present, when I’m waiting for something to happen, then I don’t write so regularly, the notes become sporadic avoidances. The most voluminous volumes are when I am living very much inside the present, waiting for a child to be born, living out of the city to write, and so on. Then I make endless observations about the most trivial, fleeting impressions, moments, thoughts, feelings. Entries like . . .

  February 15

  Something is happening to me. A kind of clarity. A cementing of my life to the here and now. Every day is wonderful through here. It has a kind of affirmation to it. A force. Even in its most tedious moments.

  March 23

  Bright and sunny. And a real ordinary Sunday. Went with B . . . for a walk. Drank wine and sat in the sun. Nina and Miwo came in about six—dirty and wet from playing outdoors all day. Dinner, then a bath for both of them.

  March 16

  2:00 A.M. Nothing is ever as it seems. It is an absolute requirement that we come to terms with th
e abstract notion we have painted of things and distinguish it from the real . . . All this prompted by a dog named Juno whom I agreed to keep for a few days. But he arrived tonight and left tonight after a ferocious whining and banging scene in my kitchen. My agreeing to keep him, of course, came out of some abstract notion I had about all dogs being friendly, easygoing, and wise, so that I refused to zero in on Juno’s peculiarities, which make him difficult, obnoxious, and stupid. The same mistake pins down my difficulties with ML . . . I had in my head some abstract notion about a friendly, cheerful, devoted housekeeper, good with the children, making cookies and doing things with them and altogether lifting somewhat the burdens of Motherhood. But again I tripped over an abstract notion only to stumble on ML . . . mute, wizened, self-righteous, incapable of communicating with the kids, and altogether increasing the burdens of Motherhood. If it were not two o’clock in the morning I could probably get a lot more mileage out of this discovery. I am sure it covers a wide expanse of territory, affecting many of the decisions I have made and many of the roads I have traveled. Perhaps it is all we are ever doing in life: constantly sorting out what is real from some abstract notion we’ve taken a fancy to. What a relief to have Juno out of the house.