Composing a Further Life

this, of different ethnic styles of caregiving, different expectations, and of how we—Americans—collectively felt about older people.” Ruth was working out of an integrated office where they didn’t specialize her with black seniors, so she simply went where she was needed, becoming aware of different patterns of kinship and family structure and of the cultural differences in how people deal with pain or misfortune or even whether they grieve out loud. “That was during the day,” she said. “And during the evening there were jazz clubs and the theater and new friends, and all of that. So I became, in my own eyes, fairly sophisticated, fairly quickly.”
    Ruth took some courses at NYU and a class or two at Columbia, not so much social work as what she called “just soap and little bit of suds.” Ultimately she moved to Massachusetts, to attend the Boston University School of Social Work. “A lot of my preoccupation was with how I was going to do,” she said. “I had graduated magna cum laude. I was, you know, highly regarded as smart, but that was in the segregated South. So I was very concerned with whether I would meet my own and the others’ high standards when I went to graduate school. I was dabbling a little bit, seeing how people do it in an integrated setting. And when I did go to graduate school, in ’sixty-three, I spent a fair amount of time worrying about that with my faculty adviser. He said, ‘Why are you worrying about this? This isn’t an issue.’ I had to convince
myself
that it was not an issue, and did.” That’s Ruth: “I had to convince myself … and did.” Decision made, issue resolved.
    “I came back to New York. I worked at a community service society, which was doing direct service. I had a caseload that was largely in the Bronx and largely but not exclusively minorities, because I was able to relate to single black women with children who were struggling and trying to figure out how to manage. I was not married nor had a kid and wasn’t thinking of it at the time, but I figured out how to be real with them.”
    During that period, Ruth met Joseph Massinga, who had come to the United States from Portuguese Mozambique. “He came to this country as a refugee, learned English, got a bachelor’s at Lincoln, came to New York and went to Manhattan College (that’s when I met him), and then to Fordham and did a master’s,” Ruth said. “And then we married, and we went to Geneva and he started on a Ph.D. in international politics.” The historic tide of liberation in Africa that brought Joseph Massinga as a student was the same tide that brought President Barack Obama’s father from Kenya to study in the United States. Each married an American woman, and each returned in the end to Africa without his American wife and child.
    “Here I am, a southern girl,” Ruth told me. “I go to the big city, I’m doing my thing pretty good, being very cosmopolitan, and I meet this rebel, romantic and vivacious, with a compelling narrative that all he wants to do is go back home and help free his people. And that’s what I signed on to. Do I know Africa? Of course not. But it’s … This was the time of liberation, both at home and abroad. I had contributed relatively nothing. I had gone to the March on Washington and I taught in a freedom school in Boston, but I hadn’t ridden buses and I hadn’t registered voters or done any of that hard stuff. But I was sure that I could, so … ‘I’ll help you to free your country.’
    “So we went marching off to Geneva, and we had—It was tough. Harder than he imagined.” As a foreigner in Switzerland, Ruth had difficulty getting a job. She did some clerical work and also some research for the International Labor Organization on the growth of multinational corporations.
    “I also became pregnant,” she said. “We had married in September ’sixty-seven, and Irv was born in December ’sixty-eight. So it wasn’t that long that I was available to the workforce. And Lord knows, I hadn’t saved any money. Joseph had a little bit of a stipend, we weren’t starving. I guess it was maybe a little better than hand-to-mouth but not a whole lot better. Well, it dragged on. In the meantime, little Mr. Massinga showed up, and my husband and parents colluded to say the baby could not be born in Switzerland. I think my mother was really concerned, I’m putting it straight out, she did not know what kind of mongrel child I was going