Composing a Life

up to tell a conference of senior NASA officials that their equipment would have to be altered in very basic and very expensive ways, wearing a miniskirt and purple tights, relying on her professional competence to establish her right to speak. When she became an executive and a senior engineer, she made a few sartorial concessions, occasionally even wearing what the advertisers call power suits, but she is too quick and vehement to look convincingly managerial.
    Alice’s descriptions of her childhood in Rumania were filled with reflections on nonconformity and reminiscences of escaping through the window and over the roof to play with neighborhood children and dogs. “I was always told not to go to the gypsies, because they had all sorts of diseases and they stole children, but of course that made me go. And I would indeed pick up worms or lice, and my granma would say, ‘You must have been with the gypsies,’ and I would say, ‘Me?’ And we would cure all these things, and I would go back. They did outrageous things—the children didn’t wear underpants, and we would take our shoes off and walk in the fields in the fresh cowshit, and the granma didn’t really scold. I developed the idea very early that if there were rules that didn’t make sense, you had to think carefully about how you broke them. If you got caught, well, OK, you got caught, but that was not a reason to stop thinking.”
    Shortly after we began work on this project, johnnetta Cole, once my neighbor in Amherst, Massachusetts, was selected to be the first black woman president of Spelman College in Atlanta, Georgia. Not one but two of her friends celebrated the occasion by sending her pairs of white gloves, spoofing the gentility she would need to adopt, but also underlining the particularity needed in designing a new role. Johnnetta’s beauty is distinctively Afro-American; she has long bones and a finely molded skull. When we spoke of her conflict with her mother back in the sixties about leaving her hair unstraightened in a compact “natural,” she said to me (as one anthropologist to another) that she likes the “dolichocephalic look.” Her honey-colored skin and blue-green eyes refer back to a white grandfather, a German immigrant, but they also evoke the invidious comparisons of shade that have inhibited emerging clarity about black ways of beauty.
    It is not easy, putting on a new identity as a college president, to learn to express the new role without meeting a stranger in the mirror. Every day, said Johnnetta, who was once a campus radical in a black motorcycle jacket, she includes at least one detail in her clothing that defies conformity—a carved ivory Janus-faced pendant, made as the emblem of a Liberian secret society; a cowrie-studded belt; or fabric hand-woven by a friend. All the issues of identity and presentation of self are complicated by the need to provide intelligible role models, for college presidents are supposed to project not only policies but lifestyles.
    A week after Johnnetta moved to Atlanta in 1987, I arrived for a ten-day stay in Reynolds Cottage, the presidential residence that sits in the middle of the shady and gracious Spelman campus, which was tranquil and empty in the middle of summer. She showed me around what is really a mansion, her comments moving between the mementos of Spelman’s past and her plans for her own tenancy. Then we took our drinks out onto a screened verandah as a storm burst and we were surrounded by sudden darkness and pouring rain, providing a curious privacy in this most public space. We were both thrown back into memories of tropical cloudbursts and started talking about Johnnetta’s time as a researcher in Liberia and the Caribbean and mine in the Philippines. When the rain stopped, the smells were completely different from our memories: lawns, the trees of temperate climates, and the flowers of the South.
    Johnnetta pointed out an area along the outside of the terrace, planted with the flower called impatiens, compliments of “The Cosby Show,” which had taped a program two months earlier at the Spelman campus, set up as the fictional Hillman College. I wondered whether someone on the show chose that flower deliberately to refer to the long slow pace of progress in opportunity: the centuries before higher education became accessible to women until the first tentative beginnings in the 1830s, the years before the Civil War when it was illegal in Georgia to teach