Almost Touching the Skies: Women's Coming of Age Stories
272
Almost Touching the Skies: Women's Coming of Age Stories
272Paperback
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Overview
Almost Touching the Skies offers an engaging, multicultural collection of fiction and memoir written between the 1870s and the 1990s. In the 1890s in New Orleans, the young heroine of a Kate Chopin story must choose between marriage to a handsome and wealthy suitor and a career as a concert pianist. Just after the turn of the century, in a dirt-poor black town in Florida, a spirited Zora Neale Hurston struggles to maintain her dreams after the death of her mother. In Depression-era Brooklyn, Edith Konecky's precociously witty character Allegra Maud Goldman contends with bourgeois Jewish parents who dote on her neurotic younger brother as they ignore or dismiss their daughter's yearnings. Shirley Geok-lin Lim, writing of her childhood in Malaysia, considers the mixed blessings bestowed on her by her schoolteacher nuns, while Marjorie Agosín, recalling her early years in Chile, pays tribute to the mysterious and fragrant world created by her family's cook, Carmencita. And Estella Conwill Májozo, calling up her memories of the "Little Africa" section of Louisville, Kentucky, in the 1950s, captures the moment she gets her first period during a stickball game with her five brothers, and is welcomed into womanhood by her family matriarchs.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781558612341 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Feminist Press at CUNY, The |
| Publication date: | 05/01/2000 |
| Pages: | 272 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.70(d) |
| Age Range: | 14 - 18 Years |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Preface
In the thirty-year history of The Feminist Press, perhaps no gesture was more significant than Tillie Olsen's insistence in 1971 that we reprint Daughter of Earth by Agnes Smedley. For faculty who had for decades taught such novels as Sons and Lovers by D.H. Lawrence, the rediscovery of Smedley allowed us to add to the curriculum a working-class novel that centered on a young woman. In Lawrence's novel, Paul Morel scoffs at a female character who claims she likes her job as a teacher. He rebukes her sharply, saying that work may be enough for men, but women need love (and a heterosexual marriage) more than anything else. Like Lawrence's Paul Morel, Smedley's Marie Rogers abandons her family, but unlike him, she channels the guilt she suffers into work for the world's poor and unknown. She knows she needs work more than marriage.
Just as important, the rediscovery of Smedley led us to imagine that we might spearhead the recovery of many more women writers. For more than a decade, The Feminist Press's publishing program focused on lost literary classics, both novels and collections of short fiction. Then, in the mid-1980s, long before memoirs had become as popular as novels, we began the Cross-Cultural Memoir Series. Both strands—fiction and memoir—have emphasized the lives of girls and young women growing to consciousness in a world not altogether friendly to their visions of themselves as autonomous, intelligent, creative, and responsible persons who know they need both love and work.
To celebrate our thirtieth anniversary, we have brought together aselection of this published work. We regret that we had to omit more than we were able to include. We also had to make the difficult decision to limit our texts to those written by American women writers, even though we had, by the 1980s, begun to publish international work. We chose to produce moments of memory. The whole is a consideration of something that marred life, marred the self, felt like an unforgivable flaw, and then turned out to be a world, an entire universe unto itself, and a part of beauty.
I introduce this book to you with pleasure, hoping you will read it in pleasure, and will give it to the young women you know, especially girls on the cusp of maturity, seeking a way to be in the world; and to all mature women who seek in literature a reflection of their own unique experience; and to all men who wonder, "What do women want?"
Marilyn French
New York City
January 2000
Chapter One
Zora Neale Hurston
* * *
From Dust Tracks on a Road
Zora Neale Hurston (1901?-1960), a novelist, journalist, folklorist, and critic, was, between 1920 and 1950, the most prolific African American woman writer in the United States. Today acknowledged as an intellectual and spiritual foremother to generations of African American writers, Hurston was a writer ahead of her time. Although her writing was praised by some when it appeared, she was also widely condemned for her audaciousness and independence.
With the publication in 1979 of the first volume of selections from her work, I Love Myself When I Am Laughing ... and Then Again When I Am Looking Mean and Impressive: A Zora Neale Hurston Reader, edited by Alice Walker, The Feminist Press became one of the pioneers in the contemporary restoration of Hurston's legacy. This excerpt, from her 1942 autobiography Dust Tracks on a Road, describes her childhood in the all-black town of Eatonville, Florida, at the turn of the century. The piece reveals both Hurston's indomitable spirit and her ear for the beauty of African American expression. Hurston's mother encouraged her daughter's strength and creativity, even in a world determined to destroy them.
* * *
My Folks
... We lived on a big piece of ground with two big chinaberry trees shading the front gate and Cape jasmine bushes with hundreds of blooms on either side of the walks. I loved the fleshy, white, fragrant blooms as a child but did not make too much of them. They were too common in my neighborhood. When I got to New York and found out that the people called them gardenias, and that the flowers cost a dollar each, I was impressed. The home folks laughed when I went back down there and told them. Some of the folks did not want to believe me. A dollar for a Cape jasmine bloom! Folks up north there must be crazy.
There were plenty of orange, grapefruit, tangerine, guavas and other fruits in our yard. We had a five-acre garden with things to eat growing in it, and so we were never hungry. We had chicken on the table often; home-cured meat, and all the eggs we wanted. It was a common thing for us smaller children to fill the iron tea-kettle full of eggs and boil them, and lay around in the yard and eat them until we were full. Any left-over boiled eggs could always be used for missiles. There was plenty of fish in the lakes around the town, and so we had all that we wanted. But beef stew was something rare. We were all very happy whenever Papa went to Orlando and brought back something delicious like stew-beef. Chicken and fish were too common with us. In the same way, we treasured an apple. We had oranges, tangerines and grapefruit to use as hand-grenades on the neighbors' children. But apples were something rare. They came from way up north.
Our house had eight rooms, and we called it a two-story house; but later on I learned it was really one story and a jump. The big boys all slept up there, and it was a good place to hide and shirk from sweeping off the front porch or raking up the back yard.
Downstairs in the dining-room there was an old "safe," a punched design in its tin doors. Glasses of guava jelly, quart jars of pear, peach and other kinds of preserves. The left-over cooked foods were on the lower shelves.
There were eight children in the family, and our house was noisy from the time school turned out until bedtime. After supper we gathered in Mama's room, and everybody had to get their lessons for the next day. Mama carried us all past long division in arithmetic, and parsing sentences in grammar, by diagrams on the blackboard. That was as far as she had gone. Then the younger ones were turned over to my oldest brother, Bob, and Mama sat and saw to it that we paid attention. You had to keep on going over things until you did know. How I hated the multiplication tables—especially the sevens!
We had a big barn, and a stretch of ground well covered with Bermuda grass. So on moonlight nights, two-thirds of the village children from seven to eighteen would be playing hide and whoop, chick-mah-chick, hide and seek, and other boisterous games in our yard. Once or twice a year we might get permission to go and play at some other house. But that was most unusual. Mama contended that we had plenty of space to play in; plenty of things to play with; and, furthermore, plenty of us to keep each other's company. If she had her way, she meant to raise her children to stay at home. She said that there was no need for us to live like no-count Negroes and poor-white trash—too poor to sit in the house—had to come outdoors for any pleasure, or hang around somebody else's house. Any of her children who had any tendencies like that must have got it from the Hurston side. It certainly did not come from the Pottses. Things like that gave me my first glimmering of the universal female gospel that all good traits and leanings come from the mother's side.
Mama exhorted her children at every opportunity to "jump at de sun." We might not land on the sun, but at least we would get off the ground. Papa did not feel so hopeful. Let well enough alone. It did not do for Negroes to have too much spirit. He was always threatening to break mine or kill me in the attempt. My mother was always standing between us. She conceded that I was impudent and given to talking back, but she didn't want to "squinch my spirit" too much for fear that I would turn out to be a mealy-mouthed rag doll by the time I got grown. Papa always flew hot when Mama said that. I do not know whether he feared for my future, with the tendency I had to stand and give battle, or that he felt a personal reference in Mama's observation. He predicted dire things for me. The white folks were not going to stand for it. I was going to be hung before I got grown. Somebody was going to blow me down for my sassy tongue. Mama was going to suck sorrow for not beating my temper out of me before it was too late. Posses with ropes and guns were going to drag me out sooner or later on account of that stiff neck I toted. I was going to tote a hungry belly by reason of my forward ways. My older sister was meek and mild. She would always get along. Why couldn't I be like her? Mama would keep right on with whatever she was doing and remark, "Zora is my young'un and Sarah is yours. I'll be bound mine will come out more than conquer. You leave her alone. I'll tend to her when I figger she needs it." She meant by that that Sarah had a disposition like Papa's, while mine was like hers.
Behind Mama's rocking-chair was a good place to be in times like that. Papa was not going to hit Mama. He was two hundred pounds of bone and muscle and Mama weighed somewhere in the nineties. When people teased him about Mama being the boss, he would say he could break her of headstrong ways if he wanted to, but she was too little that he couldn't find any place to hit her. My Uncle Jim, Mama's brother, used to always take exception to that. He maintained that if a woman had anything big enough to sit on, she had something big enough to hit on. That was his firm conviction, and he meant to hold on to it as long as the bottom end of his backbone pointed towards the ground—don't care who the woman was or what she looked like, or where she came from. Men like Papa who held to any other notion were just beating around the bush, dodging the issue, and otherwise looking like a fool at a funeral.
Papa used to shake his head at this and say, "What's de use of me taking my fist to a poor weakly thing like a woman? Anyhow, you got to submit yourself to 'em, so there ain't no use in beating on 'em and then have to go back and beg 'em pardon."
But perhaps the real reason that Papa did not take Uncle Jim's advice too seriously was because he saw how it worked out in Uncle Jim's own house. He could tackle Aunt Caroline, all right, but he had his hands full to really beat her. A knockdown didn't convince her that the fight was over at all. She would get up and come right on in, and she was nobody's weakling. It was generally conceded that he might get the edge on her in physical combat if he took a hammer or a trace-chain to her, but in other ways she always won. She would watch his various philandering episodes just so long, and then she would go into action. One time she saw all, and said nothing. But one Saturday afternoon, she watched him rush in with a new shoe-box which he thought that she did not see him take out to the barn and hide until he was ready to go out. Just as the sun went down, he went out, got his box, cut across the orange grove and went on down to the store.
He stopped long enough there to buy a quart of peanuts, two stalks of sugarcane, and then tripped on off to the little house in the woods where lived a certain transient light of love. Aunt Caroline kept right on ironing until he had gotten as far as the store. Then she slipped on her shoes, went out in the yard and got the axe, slung it across her shoulder and went walking very slowly behind him.
The men on the store porch had given Uncle Jim a laughing sendoff. They all knew where he was going and why. The shoes had been bought right there at the store. Now here came "dat Cal'line" with her axe on her shoulder. No chance to warn Uncle Jim at all. Nobody expected murder, but they knew that plenty of trouble was on the way. So they just sat and waited. Cal'line had done so many side-splitting things to Jim's lights of love—all without a single comment from her—that they were on pins to see what happened next.
About an hour later, when it was almost black dark, they saw a furtive figure in white dodging from tree to tree until it hopped over Clark's strawberry-patch fence and headed towards Uncle Jim's house until it disappeared.
"Looked mightily like a man in long drawers and nothing else," Walter Thomas observed. Everybody agreed that it did, but who and what could it be?
By the time the town lamp which stood in front of the store was lighted, Aunt Caroline emerged from the blackness that hid the woods and passed the store. The axe was still over her shoulder, but now it was draped with Uncle Jim's pants, shirt and coat. A new pair of women's oxfords were dangling from the handle by their strings. Two stalks of sugarcane were over her other shoulder. All she said was, "Good-evening, gentlemen," and kept right on walking towards home.
The porch rocked With laughter. They had the answer to everything. Later on when they asked Uncle Jim how Cal'line managed to get into the lady's house, he smiled sourly and said, "Dat axe was her key." When they kept on teasing him, he said, "Oh, dat old stubborn woman I married, you can't teach her nothing. I can't teach her no city ways at all."
* * *
Wandering
... It was not long after Mama came home [from Alabama] that she began to be less active. Then she took to bed. I knew she was ailing but she was always frail, so I did not take it too much to heart. I was nine years old, and even though she had talked to me very earnestly one night, I could not conceive of Mama actually dying. She had talked of it many times.
That day, September 18th, she had called me and given me certain instructions. I was not to let them take the pillow from under her head until she was dead. The clock was not to be covered, nor the looking-glass. She trusted me to see to it that these things were not done. I promised her as solemnly as nine years could do, that I would see to it.
What years of agony that promise gave me! In the first place, I had no idea that it would be soon. But that same day near sundown I was called upon to set my will against my father, the village dames and village custom. I know now that I could not have succeeded.
I had left Mama and was playing outside for a little while when I noted a number of women going inside Mama's room and staying. It looked strange. So I went on in. Papa was standing at the foot of the bed looking down on my mother, who was breathing hard. As I crowded in, they lifted up the bed and turned it around so that Mama's eyes would face the east. I thought that she looked to me as the head of the bed was reversed. Her mouth was slightly open, but her breathing took up so much of her strength that she could not talk. But she looked at me, or so I felt, to speak for her. She depended on me for a voice.
The Master-Maker in His making had made Old Death. Made him with big, soft feet and square toes. Made him with a face that reflects the face of all things, but neither changes itself, nor is mirrored anywhere. Made the body of Death out of infinite hunger. Made a weapon for his hand to satisfy his needs. This was the morning of the day of the beginning of things.
But Death had no home and he knew it at once.
"And where shall I dwell in my dwelling?" Old Death asked, for he was already old when he was made.
"You shall build you a place close to the living, get far out of the sight of eyes. Wherever there is a building, there you have your platform that comprehends the four roads of the winds. For your hunger, I give you the first and last taste of all things."
We had been born, so Death had had his first taste of us. We had built things, so he had his platform in our yard.
And now, Death stirred from his platform in his secret place in our yard, and came inside the house.
Somebody reached for the clock, while Mrs. Mattie Clarke put her hand to the pillow to take it away.
"Don't!" I cried out. "Don't take the pillow from under Mama's head! She said she didn't want it moved!"
I made to stop Mrs. Mattie, but Papa pulled me away. Others were trying to silence me. I could see the huge drop of sweat collected in the hollow at Mama's elbow and it hurt me so. They were covering the clock and the mirror.
"Don't cover up that clock! Leave that looking-glass like it is! Lemme put Mama's pillow back where it was!"
But Papa held me tight and the others frowned me down. Mama was still rasping out the last morsel of her life. I think she was trying to say something, and I think she was trying to speak to me. What was she trying to tell me? What wouldn't I give to know! Perhaps she was telling me that it was better for the pillow to be moved so that she could die easy, as they said. Perhaps she was accusing me of weakness and failure in carrying out her last wish. I do not know. I shall never know.
Just then, Death finished his prowling through the house on his padded feet and entered the room. He bowed to Mama in his way, and she made her manners and left us to act out our ceremonies over unimportant things.
I was to agonize over that moment for years to come. In the midst of play, in wakeful moments after midnight, on the way home from parties, and even in the classroom during lectures. My thoughts would escape occasionally from their confines and stare me down.
Now, I know that I could not have had my way against the world. The world we lived in required those acts. Anything else would have been sacrilege, and no nine-year-old voice was going to thwart them. My father was with the mores. He had restrained me physically from outraging the ceremonies established for the dying. If there is any consciousness after death, I hope that Mama knows that I did my best. She must know how I have suffered for my failure.
But life picked me up from the foot of Mama's bed, grief, self-despisement and all, and set my feet in strange ways. That moment was the end of a phase in my life. I was old before my time with grief of loss, of failure, and of remorse. No matter what the others did, my mother had put her trust in me. She had felt that I could and would carry out her wishes, and I had not. And then in that sunset time, I failed her. It seemed as she died that the sun went down on purpose to flee away from me.
That hour began my wanderings. Not so much in geography, but in time. Then not so much in time as in spirit.
Mama died at sundown and changed a world. That is, the world which had been built out of her body and her heart.