Zami: A New Spelling of My Name

Audre remembers wanting to be both man and woman, to have the best of both sexes and be able to love a woman in the same penetrative way a man can:

I have felt the age-old triangle of mother father and child, with the ‘I’ at its eternal core, elongate and flatten out into the elegantly strong triad of grandmother mother daughter, with the ‘I’ moving back and forth flowing in either direction as needed (7).

Audre remembers visiting Grenada, the homeland of her parents, and being impressed with the arrogant ease of female strength and vulnerability found there. Her mother and father emigrated to the United States in 1924; he found work as a laborer and she worked as a maid. Her mother was able to find work because she had light skin and was mistaken for being Latina, but then she got pleurisy in 1928. Her employers found out she was black and fired her.

Audre speaks of the many things her mother didn’t know—including how electricity worked—and then lists all the things her mother did know, like “mixing oils for bruises and rashes and about disposing of all toenail clippings and hair from the comb” (10). Linda, Lorde’s mother, taught Audre prayers, and Audre was in awe of her power and knowledge.

Her mother missed the water of her homeland and the persistent songs, which carried knowledge and gossip throughout the community, even though her mother was taught that they were not for decent girls to sing. Audre remembers her mother pinching her and her sisters to get them to behave in public, which Audre realized later was her mother trying to protect her from others’ racism. Much of Linda’s knowledge was not useful in America, which did not have the same resources as her homeland. Linda is afraid that the children will be stolen into slavery based on news stories. She tells her daughters stories about her homeland that she cannot talk about with her husband because it makes him sad. Her mother nostalgically describes home as a far-off place, a community of women who helped each other, and the narrator believes in the magic of Carriacou, which for many years she could not find on any map. She started believing that it was a land of her mother’s fantasy, until she found a single map when she was twenty-six that called it Curacao, “a Dutch possession on the other side of the Antilles” (14).

Audre feels the most comfortable in extremes, rather than being in the middle. She attributes this to her mother’s power, which separated her from other women of the time, including West Indian women. Linda and Byron share the decision-making in the family, retreating into their bedroom to arrive at family-policy decisions together in half-English, half-patois discussions after her father comes home from work every day. They speak with a unified voice, and their children fear the terms of their punishments. Audre conceives of her mother as other than female, although she knows she is not a man. Sometimes, she wishes that her mom is the same as other mothers, “but most often, her difference was like the season or a cold day or a steamy night in June. It just was, with no explanation or evocation necessary” (16).

Her mother can make people act without speaking, merely by fixing them with a disapproving look. Strangers would ask her opinions on things in the street, such as the cut of meat: “My mother was invested in this image of herself also, and took pains, I realize now, to hide us children from the many instances of her powerlessness” (17). In many Harlem stores, the white shopkeepers either refuse service to or are reluctant to take money from black patrons, and there is much racial tension. Whenever someone spits upon her children, Linda pretends that the action is random instead of racist. Her parents make Audre believe that they control the world, and that if she does what they tell her and work hard, she will, too. Audre remembers that none of the families she read about in books resembled her family more so than Cinderella. As a child, Audre believes that her parents are rich because of the way people always ask her mother questions, even though her mother can’t even afford to buy herself gloves. Instead, she pretends that she hates gloves and reads or sews by kerosene lamps at night, in order to save on electricity.

Audre only remembers her mother crying twice: once after a student dentist pulls out the teeth on one side of her jaw, and the other time after her father comes home from drinking and hanging out with “‘some clubhouse woman’” (20).

The Depression is especially difficult for black people, and Audre remembers being beaten for losing a penny. Her mother hoards coffee and sugar, and always gives some away to people who come over during World War II. Her mother refuses to use margarine and keeps a list of friendly supermarkets:“There were meat markets and stores we never shopped in because someone in them had crossed my mother during the war over some precious scarce commodity, and my mother never forgot and rarely forgave” (21).