Composing a Life
slaves to read, and the extra decades it has taken before the opportunities converged. Finally, it has become possible to give leadership in the education of young Afro-American women into the hands of a black woman, both at fictional Hillman and at real life Spelman. Impatience. Impatience and gracious living. When Johnnetta was formally inaugurated as president, Bill and Camille Cosby announced a donation to the college of twenty million dollars.
As Johnnetta and I sat on that verandah that first night in Atlanta, our talk was shaped by the fact that we are both anthropologists and we have both been involved in educational administration, simultaneously inventing ourselves, offering models, and trying to understand the process of change and the range of human possibility. We had met for the first time a decade and a half before, at a conference on anthropology and “relevance,” the word of the day. I had barely gotten to know Johnnetta in that group; instead of socializing with the other participants, I had raced off during the breaks to the hotel where my godmother was looking after my infant daughter, Vanni. My memories are a mix of the problems of baby food and diapers and the shock of the United States’ bombing of Cambodia and the shootings at Kent State that occurred even as we tried to formulate a statement of the contribution that anthropology could make.
Each of these women spoke of other men and women, so that each story became a lens for looking at other lives—the teachers and parents who shaped and supported us, the careers of husbands and lovers, the development of children and students, the slow healing of patients, the shared excitement of collaboration. We are all aware of living in a time when women are exploring new territory; we are all aware that these explorations will affect our understandings of men’s lives as well, and of the human condition. We have followed different roads with very different kinds of models beside us and ahead of us. Ellen was trained when the contemporary women’s movement was getting under way, but she was still one of only four women in her medical-school class. Joan matured in an earlier era of exploration and liberation, before World War II, and she had the images of Pavlova and Isadora Duncan and Martha Graham to inform her sense of possibility as a woman in the world of dance.
Because we are engaged in a day-by-day process of self-invention—not discovery, for what we search for does not exist until we find it—both the past and the future are raw material, shaped and reshaped by each individual. Four of us have close to half our adult lives still ahead. None has completed her story. My mother believed that all women, whether they have had busy multiple careers or are reviving old interests after decades as homemakers, have a hidden resource of energy and vitality for their later years. She called it “postmenopausal zest.” Even Joan, who is in her eighties, may still do some of her most important work, because for the first time the significance of that work is being fully acknowledged. When we started work, she described the new book she was writing about wisdom and the senses. Before my book was finished, hers had appeared. Even as I was writing, she and Erik were moving from California to a joint household in Cambridge, and undertaking new kinds of teaching.
Each of the women whose lives are woven into this book is a woman of stature, but it is impossible to know how far their achievements will stretch in the future. When I started thinking about this project in 1984, I had major tasks to finish before I could begin, a memoir of my parents and my father’s final book to complete, but I immediately started to think about the women I wanted to include. I made my selections one by one, but even as I proceeded, they were moving from strength to strength and becoming more public figures. When I began, Johnnetta was a professor; today she is a college president. There is no way to know what she will be able to contribute from that position to the improvement of education for blacks and women, indeed to the improvement of all American education. The focus of Ellen’s work with the homeless has shifted from research to action, but it is not yet possible to guess how it will inform and shape sustained policy commitments. There is no way to tell whether Alice’s work will become a technological landmark, flourish within a narrow and specific niche,
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