Composing a Life

attention. To be effectively centered is to affirm the existence of an internal gyroscope, to believe of oneself that
plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose
. Attaining such a conviction is difficult and painful for women who have always been encouraged to bend to exterior winds. This is why an affirmation of continuity among various stages and commitments is such a central strength. Even the continuity of self-sacrifice and dependency can be used to bridge painful discontinuities. Women who can maintain their roles of wife and mother may adjust better than their men to the loss of a family farm or to becoming refugees. The ideal is to be both centered and sensitive.
    Ellen grew up in a Jewish family in New York, the second of four sisters, her mother a full-time homemaker and her father a lawyer. She never had to give way to brothers, but she has always been torn between preparing for achievement and the attraction of her mother’s model. Ellen has especially wanted to give her children the kind of home life she had as a child. Her early ambition was to be a lawyer like her father, or a judge. Later, when she was at Brandeis University, her ambition shifted to psychology, because of a family friend working with autistic children, and then to psychiatry.
    Any minority status carries ambivalent overtones, but Ellen’s Jewish background has been a source of strength. The notion of a chosen people includes the sense that divine choice is a burden, bringing an inevitability of suffering, but still the sense of specialness is there. This specialness has often been amplified, for the Jewish emphasis on knowledge of the law has meant that Jewish communities historically had exceptionally high levels of literacy compared to the European peasant communities in which they lived. Thus, although the Jewish people have often been at a social and economic disadvantage, this has not, on the whole, produced a sense of inferiority but rather a distinctive and tenacious confidence. We see a similar phenomenon in the rapid success of immigrants from the Far East, many of whom arrive in America penniless but who come from groups long convinced of the superiority of their stock and civilization.
    In contrast, Johnnetta comes from a community that has had the suspicion of inferiority and the sense of contingency ground into it. Johnnetta grew up in Jacksonville, at a time when Florida was very much more a part of the Deep South than it is now, and the South as a whole was deeper in its Jim-Crow tradition. Still, because of a family insurance business, her family had the respect of the black community and even of the white community. When she went to downtown stores and banks, even white people would know she was Abraham Lincoln Lewis’s granddaughter, and all through her childhood, the phone would ring at night, calling her father out to help get someone out of jail. He acted as a liaison in other ways, representing the black community in the rationing administration during the war. Johnnetta’s Lewis relatives owned houses at the seashore—at American Beach, which had been developed by the Afro-American Life Insurance Company and was the only stretch of beach open to black people at that time in the entire state of Florida. As an adult, Johnnetta has benefited from programs designed to bring Afro-Americans and women into fuller participation, but she never doubted her own merits as a result. She grew up knowing she was smart.
    Still, this sense of specialness had its limits. In Jacksonville, it was impossible to be unaware of the parks and clubs and beaches that were closed to anyone of color. Exclusion and the awareness of a world denied began at the front door, for residential segregation was not as sharp in the traditional South as it has become in northern cities with their huge, all-black ghetto neighborhoods. The universal childhood experience of being warned to go to the toilet before going out was framed by the reminder that restrooms open to a black child were few and far between. As a child, Johnnetta had fantasies whenever the family went out of town in a car at night that the car would break down and the Klan would come. She would pray that her father, a Mason, would be able to rescue them by giving some magic sign that would be recognized by a white Klansman who was also a Mason.
    “I found out about race very early. I have a recollection from when I was three or four years old of a kid calling me nigger.” I