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Zami
Caption: In this portion of her book Zami, Audre Lorde speaks about growing up in Harlem. She recalls her experiences at school as a child with a vision disability, and how mother interacted with her teachers.
In Zami, Audre Lorde writes about her experiences as a child, including learning to read not in school but at a public library with a kind Black woman librarian named Augusta Baker. She also recounts her teenage and young adult years. Lorde gives the reader a sense of her family and of her early schooling in Harlem. She describes her friendships in high school and college, where she was one of a small group of Black students. She also recounts her developing identity as a lesbian, including ways that she felt she did and did not feel at home in queer spaces in Greenwich Village and elsewhere.
As a young woman, Lorde worked at a factory in Stamford, Connecticut, moved to Mexico City for a while, and then returned to New York City. She completed college and began her work as a writer in part thanks to the support of a close circle of queer women friends.
Lorde refers to Zami as a “biomythography.” That term suggests that some parts of what she writes in Zami are fictional or even mythical. We do not know exactly which parts happened in Lorde’s life and what portions she modified or invented. However, the basic outline of her life - as a child in Harlem with low vision - are confirmed by other sources.
Scholars have noticed that, in Zami and in other writings, Lorde does not speak as much about disability as she does about other aspects of her identity. She recognizes both racism and ableism, often together, were used to oppress people or make them feel less legitimate.1
When I was five years old and still legally blind, I started school in a sight-conservation class in the local public school on 135th Street and Lenox Avenue. On the corner was a blue wooden booth where white women gave away free milk to Black mothers with children. I used to long for some Hearst Free Milk Fund milk, in those cute little bottles with their red and white tops, but my mother never allowed me to have any, because she said it was charity, which was bad and demeaning, and besides the milk was warm and might make me sick.
The school was right across the avenue from the catholic school where my two older sisters went, and this public school had been used as a threat against them for as long as I could remember. If they didn’t behave and get good marks in school-work and deportment, they could be “transferred.”
…
But the catholic school had no kindergarten, and certainly not one for blind children.
I learned how to read from Mrs. Augusta Baker, the children’s librarian at the old 135th Street branch library, which has just recently been torn down to make way for a new library building to house the Schomburg Collection on African-American History and Culture. If that was the only good deed that lady ever did in her life, may she rest in peace. Because that deed saved my life, if not sooner, then later, when sometimes the only thing I had to hold on to was knowing I could read, and that that could get me through.
My mother was pinching my ear off one bright afternoon, while I lay spreadeagled on the floor of the Children’s Room like a furious little brown toad, screaming bloody murder and embarrassing my mother to death. I know it must have been spring or early fall, because without the protection of a heavy coat, I can still feel the stinging soreness in the flesh of my upper arm. There, where my mother’s sharp fingers had already tried to pinch me into silence. To escape those inexorable fingers I had hurled myself to the floor, roaring with pain as I could see them advancing toward my ears again. We were waiting to pick up my two older sisters from story hour, held upstairs on another floor of the dry-smelling quiet library. My shrieks pierced the reverential stillness.
Suddenly, I looked up, and there was a library lady standing over me. My mother’s hands had dropped to her sides. From the floor where I was lying, Mrs. Baker seemed like yet another mile-high woman about to do me in. She had immense, light, hooded eyes and a very quiet voice that said, not damnation for my noise, but “Would you like to hear a story, little girl?
Part of my fury was because I had not been allowed to go to that secret feast called story hour since I was too young, and now here was this strange lady offering me my own story.
I didn’t dare to look at my mother, half-afraid she might say no, I was too bad for stories. Still bewildered by this sudden change of events, I climbed up upon the stool which Mrs. Baker pulled over for me, and gave her my full attention. This was a new experience for me and I was insatiably curious.
Mrs. Baker read me Madeline, and Horton Hatches the Egg, both of which rhymed and had huge lovely pictures which I could see from behind my newly acquired eyeglasses, fastened around the back of my rambunctious head by a black elastic band running from earpiece to earpiece. She also read me another storybook about a bear named Herbert who ate up an entire family, one by one, starting with the parents. By the time she had finished that one, I was sold on reading for the rest of my life.
I took the books from Mrs. Baker’s hands after she was finished reading, and traced the large black letters with my fingers, while I peered again at the beautiful bright colors of the pictures. Right then I decided I was going to find out how to do that myself. I pointed to the black marks which I could now distinguish as separate letters, different from my sisters’ more grown-up books, whose smaller print made the pages only one grey blur for me. I said, quite loudly, for whoever was listening to hear, “I want to read.”
My mother’s surprised relief outweighed whatever annoyance she was still feeling at what she called my whelpish carryings-on. From the background where she had been hovering while Mrs. Baker read, my mother moved forward quickly, mollified and impressed. I had spoken. She scooped me up from the low stool, and to my surprise, kissed me, right in front of everybody in the library, including Mrs. Baker.
This was an unprecedented and unusual display of affection in public, the cause of which I did not comprehend. But it was a warm and happy feeling. For once, obviously, I had done something right.
My mother set me back upon the stool and turned to Mrs. Baker, smiling.
“Will wonders never cease to perform!” Her excitement startled me back into cautious silence.
Not only had I been sitting still for longer than my mother would have thought possible, and sitting quietly. I had also spoken rather than screamed, something that my mother, after four years and a lot of worry, had despaired that I would ever do. Even one intelligible word was a very rare event for me. And although the doctors at the clinic had clipped the little membrane under my tongue so I was no longer tongue-tied, and had assured my mother that I was not retarded, she still had her terrors and her doubts. She was genuinely happy for any possible alternative to what she was afraid might be a dumb child. The ear-pinching was forgotten. My mother accepted the alphabet and picture books Mrs. Baker gave her for me, and I was on my way.
I sat at the kitchen table with my mother, tracing letters and calling their names. Soon she taught me how to say the alphabet forwards and backwards as it was done in Grenada. Although she had never gone beyond the seventh grade, she had been put in charge of teaching the first grade children their letters during her last year at Mr. Taylor’s School in Grenville. She told me stories about his strictness as she taught me how to print my name.
I did not like the tail of the Y hanging down below the line in Audrey, and would always forget to put it on, which used to disturb my mother greatly. I used to love the evenness of AUDRELORDE at four years of age, but I remembered to put on the Y because it pleased my mother, and because, as she always insisted to me, that was the way it had to be because that was the way it was. No deviation was allowed from her interpretations of correct.
So by the time I arrived at the sight-conservation kindergarten, braided, scrubbed, and bespectacled, I was able to read large-print books and write my name with a regular pencil. Then came my first rude awakening about school. Ability had nothing to do with expectation.
There were only seven or eight of us little Black children in a big classroom, all with various serious deficiencies of sight. Some of us were cross-eyed, some of us were nearsighted, and one little girl had a patch over one of her eyes.
Our first task was to copy down the first letter of our names in those notebooks with our black crayons. Our teacher went around the room and wrote the required letter into each one of our notebooks. When she came around to me, she printed a large A in the upper left corner of the first page of my notebook, and handed me the crayon.
…
I bent my head down close to the desk that smelled like old spittle and rubber erasers, and on that ridiculous yellow paper with those laughably wide spaces I printed my best AUDRE. I had never been too good at keeping between straight lines no matter what their so it slanted down across the page something like this: AUDRE
The notebooks were short and there was no more room for anything else on that page. So I turned the page over, and wrote again, earnestly and laboriously, biting my lip, LORDE half-showing off, half-eager to please.
“Well I never!” Her voice was sharp. “I thought I told you to draw this letter? You don’t even want to try and do as you are told. Now I want you to turn that page over and draw your letter like everyone…” and turning to the next page, she saw my second name sprawled down across the page.
There was a moment of icy silence, and I knew I had done something terribly wrong. But this time, I had no idea what it could be that would get her so angry, certainly not being proud of writing my name.
She broke the silence with a wicked edge to her voice. “I see.” she said. “I see we have a young lady who does not want to do as she is told. We will have to tell her mother about that.” And the rest of the class snickered, as the teacher tore the page out of my notebook.
“Now I am going to give you one more chance,” she said, as she printed another fierce A at the head of the new page. “Now you copy that letter exactly the way it is, and the rest of the class will have to wait for you.” She placed the crayon squarely back into my fingers.
…
The next morning at school, the teacher told my mother that she did not think that I was ready yet for kindergarten, because I couldn’t follow directions, and I wouldn’t do as I was told.
My mother knew very well I could follow directions,… And she also believed that a large part of the function of school was to make me learn how to do what I was told to do. In her private opinion, if this school could not do that, then it was not much of a school and she was going to find a school that could. In other words, my mother had made up her mind that school was where I belonged.
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Alison Kafer and Eunjung Kim, “Disability and the Edges of Intersectionality,” in The Cambridge Companion to Literature and Disability, ed. Clare Barker and Stuart Murray (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 123-138. See also Sami Schalk, Black Disability Politics (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2022). ↩︎
Categories: Manhattan, higher education,
Tags: women's activism, the arts, disabled people, Black people, queer people, blindness low vision, Harlem,
Date: 1982
Creator: Audre Lorde, Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (Persephone Press, 1982)
Source: Audre Lorde, Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (Persephone Press, 1982)
Source link:
Copyright: Audre Lorde
How to cite: “Zami,” in New York City Civil Rights History Project, Accessed: [Month Day, Year], https://nyccivilrightshistory.org/topics/black-latina-women/audre-lorde-cuny/zami-a-new-spelling-of-my-name.
- How does Audre Lorde feel about reading?
- How does Audre Lorde’s mother respond to her daughter’s experience at the library, and at the school? Would you describe Lorde’s mother as an educational activist? Why or why not?
- Lorde writes about how she came to call herself Audre, rather than Audrey. Why was naming important to her? How are names important to you and your friends?
- What do you think Audre Lorde meant when, in describing her schooling experience, she wrote: “Ability had nothing to do with expectation”? What examples from her school experience relate to this comment? How does this comment apply, or not apply, to your experience in school?
- Audre Lorde became a writer and an educator. In the City University of New York, she taught classes designed to welcome Black and Latinx young people into college and encourage them as students. How do you think her own schooling experience as a disabled Black girl might have shaped her work as an educator? How do you think her queer identity might have shaped her teaching?
- Later in Zami, Lorde writes this about her mother: “My mother was a very powerful woman. This was so in a time when that word-combination of woman and powerful was almost unexpressable in the white american common tongue, except or unless it was accompanied by some aberrant [meaning unusual, or going against the pattern] … adjective like blind, or hunchback, or crazy, or Black.” What does Lorde mean by this? How would you put this idea in your own words? How does Lorde suggest that, in the life of her mother, racism, gender, and ableism connected with one another? Do you think Lorde’s words, written in 1982, are true today? Why or why not?