The Bold World Page 6

  The more I learned about Ericka, the more I learned about Elaine. Elaine Brown was the first complicated, unexplainable, “bougie-ghetto” (in her words) badass Black woman I’d ever encountered. She was all things: a radical thinker, a kept woman, a strip club waitress, a mother, a lover, undeniably Black, ambiguously exotic, marginalized, politically active, and more than anything else, someone who just didn’t give a fuck. Ericka didn’t open up much to people about her mother, but she told me these stories in the deep, raspy voice she inherited from Elaine, and I ate them up like candy. The dessert at the end of my hearty meal of Shirley Chisholms and Rosa Parkses. Elaine was the decadent complement—sumptuous and satisfying, and so, so necessary. A heroine not included in most history books.

  What I had begun to experience was the sensation of personal freedom, like the tremor before orgasm. The Black Panther Party had awakened a thirst in me. And it had given me the power to satisfy it. For a black woman in America, to know that power is to experience being raised from the dead.

  —ELAINE BROWN, A Taste of Power

  I read Elaine’s autobiography and learned how she went from “a rather unconscious, silly girl to someone who knew things.” I, Jodie, felt like an unconscious, silly girl with no big thoughts of my own, and I desperately wanted to be someone who knew things. Who cared about things. I learned how she made room for herself at the head of the table in the Black Panther Party and demanded recognition and respect. Like my dad, what she wanted, really, was more than just a taste of power—she wanted it all.

  Elaine had recently left the Party because she’d had enough, exhausted from fighting the Man, beat down by the blatant sexism of her Panther men, and simply tired of being broke and tired. She was well known all over the world and was often in the company of the most well-to-do people, but in many ways Elaine was still a marginalized Black woman who could barely pay her rent and Ericka’s tuition. So, after meeting a wealthy Frenchman named Pierre at a high-society party in L.A., she threw in the towel, accepted his invitation to move to France, and became his lover. Unconcerned with how it might look, or how her legacy might be rewritten, she headed for the hills to try on another life. One filled with maids and a chef and a driver. It was a life in which she got up each day only when she felt like opening her eyes.

  “It was a superficial and frivolous time,” she told me much later. “But I loved living life as a princess.” Here was someone who rebuilt herself, and rebuilt herself, and rebuilt herself again. She held her oppositions all together in one body, and she proudly showed them off. Elaine refused to be defined by one narrative, or to let one thread of her existence discount another. I wanted exactly that for myself.

  My feelings for Elaine, the complex revolutionary, the sexy badass, the woman who gave zero fucks, bordered on obsession. And when I’d return home to New York on holidays, I took it as an opportunity to play out some of her stories, becoming what I thought a 1990 Elaine Brown would be like.

  I was twenty-one years old when I became a true lover—capital L—for the first time in my life. I started dating Serge during the summer after my junior year at Spelman, though we’d first met years before in the thick of New York’s nightlife scene, when I was sixteen and he was twenty-five. I’d see Serge out with a slew of women draped around him, saying hello as I made my way to the dance floor to stand in a circle with my high school girlfriends, bopping and swaying self-consciously to the beat. His eyes were always on me, quietly watching. But I was still interested in high school things, and boys my age—the ones with George Michael haircuts or gold teeth like Bobby Brown. I was certainly not interested in gentle, soft-spoken Serge—a man much older than I was.

  But we kept in touch through the years and built a friendship. He’d call every so often to say hi, and we’d talk about things—about theater and architecture and design. Stuff I knew nothing about, but desperately wanted to learn because Serge made it all sound so exciting. When I’d come home to New York during breaks at Spelman, he’d take me to art openings or movies in the East Village. With Serge, I remember seeing a play about the Black Panther leader Huey P. Newton—it was the first time I’d gone to the theater without my parents.

  He was patient, willing to put in years before we ever dated. He never demanded anything of me. In the beginning, he only gave—a phone call, a conversation. A dozen white roses with a note reading “I miss you. Please call.” He checked in on me every month for years, and over time I began to see him differently. By that summer after my junior year, I had grown tired of the possessive, cocky men I was typically drawn to—the Aarons, and the young men at the college across the street, those who resembled my dad in a lot of ways. And so I opened myself to him.

  Serge was a free-thinking European—mom a Swiss German, dad Vietnamese—and he possessed a quietly chaotic spirit that took him from probing conversations to long stretches of deep thought. When I was back home from college during breaks, I lived with Serge. We’d walk through the streets of Tribeca and I’d watch his mind at work. The graffiti on a wall reminded him of Basquiat, whom he knew in the early eighties when all of downtown New York looked like that block we had just passed; the architecture of that building on the corner made him think of a book he was reading, which made him think of love, which made him think of me. He’d grab my hand and smile, overcome with emotion. The entire moment conjured for him a Nina Simone song, the two of us singing “My baby just cares for me” as we floated down Church Street.

  I was fascinated by the things he knew and the way he gave all of his information to me. As though life was to be shared, not divided up and conquered. I had never heard my parents debating ideas together for the pleasure of it. But with Serge, we’d talk as if everything were entirely made for our exploration. We were theologians in search of learning more—about religion or sex or art, or each other.

  We’d go back and forth on topics that had no answers, just to see where the conversation would take us. With Serge, I was learning not to be bound by tradition and how things are, but instead to explore for the sake of finding new ways and new stories.

  It was Serge who encouraged me to cut off my hair the summer we started dating. He wasn’t concerned with length or texture or night styles—as so many of my schoolmates were. He thought my nose was one of my best features, and that a short pixie cut would highlight it. So I did, I cut it all off to try on a new, more daring form of beauty. And in doing so I took a radical stand in the “good hair” versus “bad hair” debate on campus, where long, straight hair was the optimal standard of beauty, and watched everyone stare while I walked the halls completely shorn.

  Whenever we were together, Serge would take dozens of Polaroids of me, stretched out across his black leather couch, or in bed, or of just my profile while I sat at the kitchen table. And then we’d look at them together. “I love your back, Jodie. It’s so defined. And your hips, too—they’re strong.”

  I loved how he placed the word “strong” next to my hips. I hadn’t ever thought of them as strong before. Serge made me look at, touch, and acknowledge my own self. I began to think about my body and, for the first time, to feel rightfully attached to it. Before then I had regarded it mostly with disdain. But from then forward, my body—my everything—started to come into focus. And I was roused awake. Aroused by adventure and challenge, by Blackness, by my own sexuality—and by a brand-new love.

  Who am I in this world? I began to think. What does it mean to be a woman? Is it my body, my mind, or my spirit? Or maybe it is defined by the power I wield.

  * * *

  —

  By the time I entered my senior year, I was fully exploring—crisscrossing barriers and mixing references, pulling from all the women I had read about—Toni Morrison, Zora Neale Hurston, Maya Angelou, Lorraine Hansberry, Audre Lorde—and those I was getting to know at school. I joined an African women’s group and took African studies classes, amas
sed a collection of ankhs and started writing protest poetry (because, why not?).

  I recited my uncle Gil’s lyrics while wrapping my head each morning in African cloth. You will not plug in, turn on and cop out…Because the revolution will not be televised.

  It was all a little clumsy, as to be expected from a college-age revolutionary. But I was catapulting myself from a silly girl with no big thoughts to someone empowered—whose possibilities were suddenly limitless. This idea of power and purpose was something my dad tried to teach me growing up, but his version lacked what I needed most: the crucial element of feminism—where I, a young woman, could be the king.

  It was the women in the stories I read, and the women sitting next to me in class, and the women writers, and that woman I called Grandmother, who imprinted on me. All strong-voiced and strong-willed. All defiantly optimistic. All lovers of the word. All believers in transformation. Those women spoke to my heart and made me feel not only seen, but exalted.

  * * *

  —

  During my four years at Spelman, my classmates and I had become sisters, unfolding and waking up in the world. We had been nurtured and groomed by sheroes and kings, and now, sitting in formation in the Atlanta Civic Center, just minutes away from receiving our diplomas, we were Black Girl Magic in the flesh.

  Maya Angelou, one of Dr. Cole’s most trusted sister-friends, took to the stage as our commencement speaker. “I belong to you,” she began. “I have given birth to you. You are absolutely mine. Because…I have loved you.”

  Maya Angelou’s voice was raspy. She didn’t sound professorial or academic. She spoke to us as if we were in her kitchen, sitting around her table, while she cooked us a meal.

  “You are already paid for. You do not have to pay for yourselves.”

  I had no clue what she was talking about—it was way over my head. But I was intrigued, so I shifted to the right a little so I could get a better look at her between my classmates sitting in front of me.

  What did she mean by “paid for”? Dr. Angelou had sung a slave auction song as we filed into the auditorium before the ceremony began: “Bid ’em in, get ’em in; Bid ’em in, get ’em in.” Maybe she was talking in metaphors, about self-ownership—taking ourselves back from slave owners and now owning ourselves. But I wasn’t sure.

  She continued—singing, speaking, laughing, reciting poetry she had written years ago. Even dancing a little.

  “When you walk into an office you don’t go alone,” she was saying. “Bring your people with you. Bring everybody that has loved you with you: ‘Come on, Grandma, let’s go. Come on, Auntie.’ When you walk in, people don’t know what it is about you. They can’t take their eyes off of you. They say, ‘She has charisma’—No, what you have is all those people around you.”

  I started to understand what Dr. Angelou was telling us. She was talking about family and memory, and the power of both combined. About holding on to collective energy and to a love that surrounds us—and to the blood, sweat, and tears that our mothers and mothers’ mothers spilled for us so that we could attend Spelman.

  She was talking about the same thing Daddy had been instilling in me with his trips to the Jungle: connection—to all the women and men, relatives and loved ones who have cared for me and worked for me and lived for me, and already paid for me, many times over. Maya Angelou was telling us, 250 Black women—we belong.

  During the course of her speech, my eyes never left hers. I heard every word she spoke and every thing she asked. Of us she asked that we stop and wonder about our great-grandmothers. She asked us to work now, very hard, so that we can pay for our granddaughters. She asked us to always know that we are loved and to always bring our beloveds into every space with us so that we know we are not alone. Each poem she referenced, each spiritual she sang, every validation of my existence, would be with me forever.

  “However I am perceived or deceived,” Dr. Angelou said, in closing, “lay aside your fears that I will be undone, for I shall not be moved.”

  Dad giving me a pep talk on life, moments after I walked the stage at graduation.

  And then it took hold of me, snatching me faster than the boys and the wild abandon—and even more forcefully than the tug of freedom I felt in high school: the idea that I could own myself, could be my own anchor. In that moment, in a stadium that dwarfed me in size, surrounded by hundreds of people, I felt every bit of my strength. It surged up through my legs, humming in my belly. I could feel how fortified I was—how fortified I’d always been. “You had it before you earned it,” Dr. Angelou had told us. “Because it is your inheritance.”

  I no longer worried that my skinny legs might not make it across the stage. I was not at all scared of strutting past the rows and rows of distinguished guests and faculty, past our ferocious Dr. Cole and our mystical Maya Angelou—past our parents, holding their breath. And past grandmothers and aunties, sisters and friends, all beaming as if our diplomas were their own.

  When my name was finally called out over the loudspeaker—“Jodie Miishee Patterson”—I took a deep breath and strode, with new confidence, across that long stage. Because at the other end was not just my hard-earned diploma—it was the whole world awaiting.

  THREE

  Serious Daring

  Clap-clap-clap. “What’s your next move, Jodatha?” Daddy stood in front of me like a drill sergeant, trying to jolt me into action. I lay sprawled across the couch in the den of his apartment one afternoon—basking in my most recent achievement, feeling confident that life was on my side.

  I shrugged, unconcerned. “Not sure.” It felt as if I had all the time in the world. I had a college diploma from Spelman, and the Dr. Maya Angelou in my corner—how could things not fall into place? To say the least, I was hella optimistic about my future, but unlike many of my multitasking classmates, I hadn’t lined up a job, or even an interview, during the last months of my senior year, and I hadn’t a clue as to what my career might be.

  “Well, make a list of all the things you love. And then do one of those things. You need to get a move on it, baby girl.” I could tell from Daddy’s tone that if I wanted any of his respect, and perhaps a bit of his help, I’d need to land a job and stay in the game. Daddy didn’t tolerate inertia.

  Over the next several days, I began making what turned out to be a very short list:

  1) Reading

  2) ?

  3) ??

  Yep, reading was about it.

  Serge had a subscription to The New Yorker, which Serge and I plowed through religiously. We had stacks and stacks of The New York Times. And I had hundreds of books: used and worn ones from Grandma Gloria’s collection, and brand-new ones that I’d scooped up from various bookstores across the city. Aside from my library, I had very little else to my name when I moved back to New York after graduation and into the loft I shared with Serge. Just a few pieces of clothing, three pairs of shoes, and no valuables to speak of. I wanted for nothing more, really, except to read—and then to think about, talk about, or write about what I had just read. How those passions would translate into a job that didn’t involve teaching or freelancing for magazines—neither of which particularly interested me—I wasn’t at all sure.

  With no concrete post-Spelman plans on the horizon, I decided to spend the summer traveling through Europe with a best friend from college. We bought Eurail Passes and round-trip tickets to Vienna, where my sister Ramona was living, intent on seeing new things, thinking new thoughts, and returning with a solid plan for the rest of our lives.

  That summer of 1992, we visited cities I’d never seen: Prague, Budapest, Madrid, Paris, Venice, Corfu. While my friend saw the sights, I’d sit in the same café from morning till early evening, poring over The Unbearable Lightness of Being, absorbing each word, sentence, and punctuation mark. Then I’d write in my journal about what I’d read. I liked the
pace of the book, how it read slowly and methodically, almost putting me in a trance. I connected with the idea of needing more weight to one’s being. And I understood how miserable it is to feel without substance.

  Those long days spent alone, with words swimming around in my head and endless cups of coffee in my bloodstream, were some of the most romantic hours of my life. I had fallen even more deeply in love with books, and by the end of our trip I knew I wanted nothing more for myself than to be a book editor—a master of words.

  After six weeks of youth hostels, cafés, and backpacks, I returned to New York that fall and began the job search. I sent out dozens of persuasive cover letters and samples of my own writing, looking for any entry-level position in publishing that would take me. Nothing was too small, I thought—I just needed my first break. In less than two months, I landed a job at Scholastic, the well-known children’s publishing company. I was to be the administrative assistant to the director of communications, and although I was unclear on what the communications department actually did, Scholastic—certainly from where I sat—was at the epicenter of publishing. I felt I had hit the bull’s-eye.

  The job, I soon found out, consisted mostly of faxing, copying, scheduling, and cleaning up both my and my boss’s mistakes before anyone could catch on. Every day I went into the office with a tiny kernel of promise, hoping my days of administrative grunt work would finally be rewarded with something substantial—at the very least, writing for the company’s news bulletin. But, to my disappointment, I never wrote or read anything beyond a memo.