“There are years that ask questions and years that answer.” Zora Neale Hurston
Who do we have in this life to guide us? When our families have passed on their wisdom, shared their secrets, and left us to discover for ourselves. Surely there are beings who are watching, voices whispering in a distant key, and spirits that shape us beyond the scope of our eyes, but not the realm of our hearts.
I have three black and white photographs taped to the headboard of my pink canopied bed, Zora Neale Hurston, the fearless, outspoken novelist; Lillian Hellman, the principled, courageous playwright; and my mother, Nona Gayles, a professor of Women’s Literature and an unabashed book lover and theater-goer. It was she who named me after women writers who bore no daughters of their own but nurtured enduring, precious works of art into being. I call this trio of female heroines my “Gallery Femmes Extraordinaire.” My mother died five years ago, leaving behind a fifteen year old girl with only books and memories to help me become a woman in their likeness.
When she died everything in my life, including my Gallerie wall, was empty. I was eleven years old and already tired of opening my eyes to silent, motherless mornings. At night I’d struggle to keep from falling to sleep, afraid I’d slip into darkness, and lose my adolescent way. In panic, I’d fix my eyes on the steady, certain faces of my “Galleries Femmes Extraordinaire.” The renegade in Zora, the cockiness of Lillian, the serenity of my mother buoyed me.
Zora’s picture I took from a Manhattan theatre playbill. She looks proud and stubborn standing next to the Twenties roadster her patron and “Godmother” bought for her folklore-collecting trips to Florida. One foot is propped up on the running board, the other, in a dusty leather pump, is firmly planted in the dirt. She looks as if she is saying, “I always guessed, and certainly, I now clearly know that somewhere along the line I could and maybe should have chosen another way, a safer way.” But of course, it was Lillian who said that, although I find they often said the same things, just with different words.
My mother took me to see a one woman show about Zora when I was nine. At the time I had no way of knowing that it was the same theater that Lillian had debuted her first play in years before. We had tea at a restaurant across from a majestic fountain in Lincoln Center before the afternoon matinee. My mother wore a multi-colored kente cloth shawl, and a matching hat. I thought she looked more like a writer than a mother, just like Zora, who she explained had been her favorite writer since she studied literature at Spelman College. Now my mother is gone and Zora has become my guide and mentor. I think my mother would be pleased. I didn’t have to wait until college to discover her.
Or Lillian. In her photo she is wearing a hat with its brim creased down, her head tilted a little to the side. Although she and Zora share the same satisfied cocky smile, they are in utter contrast to each other. Zora, with her brown skin, is unmistakably African-American, and Lillian, with her sharp, angular nose, is unmistakably European, and Jewish.
I ripped Lillian Hellman’s picture from a book I was assigned to read in school, which I borrowed from the New York Public Library. The play she wrote, “The Children’s Hour,” was absorbing, but it was the author who captivated me completely. Lillian was raised in New Orleans by her large prosperous family, but mostly by Sofronia, her wet nurse, a black woman. There is a photo of Ruby Sofronia in Lillian’s memoir, a handsome light-skinned woman with short-cropped hair, wearing a starched white apron. I wanted to keep this photo too, but decided that other readers might want to see the stately old lady who raised the first Pulitzer Prize winning female dramatist. I left Lillian’s treasured photo in the book, returned it to the Public Library and never heard a word about the one photo that was missing.
I was raised to respect books and other people’s property, but I still kept that photo of Lillian. She said the only thing that made sense to me after my mother’s funeral. Everyone in my family had tried to console me saying that my mother was in a better place. Lillian Hellman wrote, “A defeat for an only child can always be turned into a later victory.” My mother’s death, I determined, would be the very thing that would help me become victorious in the end.
Victorious is the adjective that best describes the way in which my mother lived. Nona’s short forty-two years were spent seeking victory in everything she undertook, from graduating magna cum laude from college, to marrying New York’s most eligible bachelor, to giving birth to me with no anesthesia after twelve tough hours of labor. My mother combined the qualities I most admire in Zora and Lillian, courage, truth and great style. She was the spiritual progeny of two unique writer women whose paths may never have crossed, but who voiced similar thoughts, in much the same way, on much the same journey.
My mother was part Zora, part Lillian, half black and half Jewish. She had the penetrating, dark eyes of her Jewish father, Wilfred Iselin, and the cocoa brown skin of her mother, Delores Bentley. Raised in the South by Delores, after Wilfred died at war, her voice sounded like my grandmother’s, sugary warm and soothing, the sound of it stuck to you like warm molasses, which was also the color of her skin. I imagine she sounded like Zora who was born in Florida, and Lillian born in New Orleans, both of who drew from the well of the South for their lies and stories, inspiration and indignation.
The best photograph in my Gallerie is of my mother, Nona Iselin Gayles. She is wearing a tight, gold sequined dress, and a blazing smile with a wisp of smoke encircling her head like a halo. My mother holds a mother-of-pearl cigarette holder between her long, elegant, manicured fingers. She is standing next to my father. I imagine they were at the opening of one of his fabled nightclubs. That was before the other great event in my life, my parent’s divorce. But back then, in the Seventies, disco was a fever they’d both caught, and neither knew that smoking wasn’t simply an innocent pleasure. Now she is gone from lung cancer, and my father is charged with the task of raising his only daughter.
Caleb Gayles is an exemplary father, but not the kind of man my mother would want me to marry. A lover of ladies, he is a successful New York restaurateur with an insatiable appetite for women. He’s as well known for creating culinary delicacies as he is for feasting on delectable members of the opposite sex. I am in good company. Both Zora and Lillian had fathers who were considered the “ladies men.” There is something to be said for men with large appetites for bedding women raising the type of women who view sleeping with men as freely as men do.
Lillian describes her happily married father, Max, as “a handsome man, witty, high-tempered, proud, with a number of women in his life.” And even though it was Zora’s nurturing mother, Lucy Ann, who encouraged her to “jump at the sun,” it was John Huston, Zora’s handsome, “meandering” father who showed Zora how to it was done. He was mayor of Eatonville, Florida, the first all-black township in America.
After a summer spent with my father in the tiny town of Oak Bluffs on the island of Martha’s Vineyard this year, I have come closer to knowing the answers to questions every young woman must ask herself. Do men really like us? Or do they simply relish the idea of who we are? Hesitating to take the next step into womanhood I watched my father wrestle questions I don’t think he’d ever cared to answer. Or perhaps, he was just not ready. As much as he loves women, even before the events of this summer, I knew that he didn’t like them very much. Or at least, not the strong, outspoken ones like Zora, Lillian and Nona. But that was before he met the one woman who was the perfect combination of all three.
Men grow the same as women I’ve learned, maybe at a different pace, but in their own time. All this came to me, the summer of my awakening, under the watchful gaze of my female protectors. I watched my father and I blossomed.
The first day of August, our traditional departure date, Caleb and I left the City for our summer house. I carefully took the photographs down from my wall, pressed them in the pages of a Willa Cather novel, (which was on my school summer reading list,) and stashed it in my hot pink backpack. I packed nothing else. Everything we need, all our possessions, stay in our Ocean Park house, untouched from year to year, waiting for my father and me to show up and breathe life into them again.
My parents bought our three story Victorian, with a view of the Vineyard Sound and the band shell, when I was a baby. Back then Caleb and Nona were a happy couple. Caleb owned a single restaurant in Harlem. My mother taught literature at Ethical Culture. We lived in East Village in a loft with music and art, (an original Romare Bearden, and a sketch by Georgia O’Keefe,) and gauging from the photographs in my Aunt Evelyn’s scrapbook, it looks like we were the perfect family. In one picture, the day of my christening, my dad resembles Paul Robeson and my Mom looks like Lena Horne. With me in a hand crocheted christening cap and antique lace gown we could be a Ralph Lauren advertisement in black face.
The house in the Vineyard eventually became my father’s, my mother kept their East Village co-op apartment. Since age ten I’ve spent equal time shuttling between the two. On Thursdays I’d pack my bag and wait for the taxi Dad sent to carry me to his Central Park West address. There I’d stay until Mom would ring the buzzer for me on Sunday nights to join her in our plant and book filled loft. Now, Sundays on Central Park West, I still wait to hear the buzzer ring even though I know she’s not coming. Dad tries to fill the silences with lively conversation, or music from the new artists he’s met at his club, or an apartment full of people who will appear in pictures in “Source Magazine” or “Vanity Fair.” Only thinking of Zora and Lillian makes her absence bearable. Zora lost her mother when she was nine. Lillian lost Sofronia, the black woman who was her wet nurse, “…the first and most certain love of my life” at an early age when Sofronia found work with another family. My solace comes from knowing that I am in good company. Zora once said, “… tears and laughter, love and hate, make up the sum of life.” I know that I have only just begun to live.
With my treasured photos tucked away, I tossed my backpack on the pile of luggage accumulating by our front door. It would be a five-hour drive through three states, and a forty-five minute ferry crossing before they would grace the sloping, wainscoted walls of my Oak Bluffs bedroom. This would be the fifth summer that my “Galleries Femmes Extraordinaire” accompanied me. My beloved photographs had weathered repeated tapings, southern exposure, the ocean mist and salt air. I wondered how many more seasons they could withstand the trip.
This year we drove to the Vineyard in record time. Dad’s most recent toys are a four wheel drive, gas guzzling SUV, I dubbed “The Vehicle,” and Markeeta Goins, a twenty five year old model, “The Body,” both of which he is currently obsessed with. Markeeta was beautiful and sweet, and learning to speak French, (since she was booked for the fall couture shows in Paris.) I thought if she kept her headsets on listening to French tapes, and didn’t try to be too amusing, we’d get long without incident. I was looking forward to another tranquil, lazy summer, Caleb and me, with the sun and the water, and the long dinners we both prepared and adored. The addition of Markeeta wasn’t an immediate tip-off, Dad usually brings along a girl, but maybe we’d had our quota of halcyon days. When life is too easy, it’s usually a prelude to a bit of drama. The ocean has taught me that.
I’m a student of tides. Low tide is my favorite, I collect rocks and shells, swim undisturbed through calm water as clear and effervescent as club soda. High tide can knock you off your feet with an unassuming wave that gathers force from out of nowhere and drags you across the ocean floor against rocks and stones hidden under the murky surface. This summer was more high tide than low.
