Composing a Life

or languish as technological directions change. The relationships and the circumstances of their lives also continue to evolve.
    These are lives in flux, lives still indeterminate and subject to further discontinuities. This very quality protects me from the temptation to interpret them as pilgrimages to some fixed goal, for there is no way to know which fragments of the past will prove to be relevant in the future. Composing a life involves a continual reimagining of the future and reinterpretation of the past to give meaning to the present, remembering best those events that prefigured what followed, forgetting those that proved to have no meaning within the narrative.
    Johnnetta described to me being taken to meet Maruca, a diviner in Sño Paulo, by a Brazilian anthropologist who had just written a doctoral dissertation on divination. Maruca is a woman in the service of the ancient Yoruba gods, the Orishas, brought by slaves from Nigeria.
    “We got to this ordinary house in an ordinary working-class neighborhood. Maruca sat on the end of her bed, and there was a chair for me and a table, where I recognized all the things the Yoruba use for divination: a glass of water, a snake plant, the carved image of a fist to keep away the evil eye, the cowrie shells. Then I looked up at this woman, and she had the most penetrating eyes I had ever seen in my life. She asked my name and then she grabbed the cowries as if to throw them and went into some form of trance, acting as a medium rather than divining. She looked at me and said, ‘You are about to change your job, to do something that is very close to what you now do but it’s different and it’s what very few women do in your country. It’s a job working among our people, a very important job, and you must let the Orishas guide you.’ Well, this was July, and I couldn’t imagine what she was talking about. I’m not looking for a job! I teach anthropology at Hunter College. And I don’t believe in divination! But then she went on to describe me in ways that had me sitting there bawling like a baby, because I confronted myself in the description. She talked about the pain I had gone through, particularly as I broke with my husband, and then she identified my Orishas, a male and a female, Ogun the warrior and Yansan, and said that she saw my life extended back in an unbroken line from West Africa.” It was August 1 when Johnnetta got back to New York. When she walked into her office she found not one but several notes, each from a friend who had proposed her name to the newly announced search committee for the Spelman presidency. “And that,” laughed Johnnetta, “is how Spelman College is connected to Brazil.” An unbroken line of meaning that is also an unbroken line of commitment.
    Alice, in her narratives about her evolving interest in management, kept going back to her final months at Harvard Observatory, when she worked on the design of experimental equipment for Skylab. She had declined an invitation to head the engineering group for the project because she was preoccupied with other emotional issues, and watched the project founder even though she was successful in her own technical assignment. “I was just treating the work as a sort of puzzle that I had to get solved, instead of thinking about the significance of the work for other people, so the project never came together. Harvard didn’t fly an experiment on that satellite. They flew empty space. They sent up a lead box instead. That was traumatic for me, even though no one could point a finger at me because I wasn’t in charge.”
    In the spring of my first year at Amherst College, a senior professor and alumnus came up to my husband at a cookout and told him warmly that I was doing “amazingly well” as dean. Even though the comment was intended benevolently, it was a reflection of the constant atmosphere of sexism at Amherst. Still, I took it as friendly and believed there was a real willingness to move beyond it. It is hard now not to see that comment as an omen of an unfolding sequence in which old assumptions were reasserted and habitual bias made me vulnerable. It’s hard to remember the positive atmosphere at the time. So it is that many people only remember the good times with a beloved spouse who has died and only the painful moments in a marriage that has failed. We can often look at a grown-up child and find the threads of continuity, saying he or she was always a politician, a