Composing a Life

in religion was rather venturesome, involving the notion that belief is not a given of growing up in a particular family but a matter of choice. In some ways, my grandparents were chauvinistic about their chosen nonconformities and felt rather superior to those who had less education or enlightenment. But in other ways, I see them as open to the imagination of alternative ways of being.
    My father’s father, who crusaded ferociously for his convictions against various kinds of spiritualism and Lamarckianism, thought of his own vocation of scientist as lofty but lower than that of artist. He collected the paintings and drawings of William Blake, Japanese prints, embroideries and old-master drawings. As I see them now, these are very different choices. To collect old-master drawings was to choose an economical and attainable form of a familiar excellence, but to immerse himself in the visions and prophetic writings of Blake was to embrace a different consciousness—bizarre, angry, and strangely beautiful, turning ordinary perceptions upside down. “The harlot’s cry from street to street/Will weave old England’s winding sheet.” I have wondered occasionally, in these years when we have learned to look anew at needlework as forms of women’s expression, whether the embroideries he collected were also ways to enter other modes of thinking and being, especially since his mother, his wife, and his sisters were all variously involved in women’s rights and in exploring new roles.
    When my mother wrote about her childhood, it always seemed that her chosen model was her paternal grandmother, but recently I have become increasingly curious about her mother, my maternal grandmother. Richard Juliani, a sociologist studying the history of Italians in America, has pointed out that Margaret Mead first learned about the importance of culture from her mother’s research on Italian immigrants. Long before she encountered anthropology and went to Samoa, she had done fieldwork with her mother in New Jersey, where she met and learned to respect people with different customs. She had heard her mother’s convictions on the human capacity to change and adapt; she had also heard her counter the arguments of the eugenics movement, which maintained that Italian and Eastern European immigrants were genetically inferior.
    For Americans today, composing a life means integrating one’s own commitments with the differences created by change and the differences that exist between the peoples of the world with whom we increasingly come into contact. Because we have an altered sense of the possible, every choice has a new meaning.
    When Johnnetta was growing up, a nonracist America was hardly imaginable; today it can be imagined but must still be struggled for. The imagination of difference was also blocked in another way, for educated black people in Jacksonville looked down on black people from the Caribbean and Africa. The implication was that blacks in Jacksonville should aspire to be like the white people around them, but there was a secondary message beating on them that they would always be something less.
    “I remember all those derogatory terms. ‘Monkey chasers’ were the people from the Caribbean. Because of the closeness of Florida to the Bahamas, Jamaica, Barbados, there was a lot of that sentiment. In my family, we were told not to have that view, that black people from other places were not less good than black people born in the U.S. My great-grandfather had named his company the
Afro-
American Life Insurance Company, after all. But even so, if I wanted a dress that my mother thought was too red, she’d say, ‘You don’t want to look like some . . .’ (she’d use a distorted set of syllables supposed to indicate some African tribe), ‘You don’t want to look like one of those Ubidubi tribes.’ There were conflicting messages about ‘those tribal jump-up-and-down-big-lipped people’ that you didn’t want to have any part of.”
    Black consciousness has not only affirmed a positive and equal identity for American blacks, but it has also offered a sense of multiple possibilities: Africa as a place of rich and fertile variation, experiments in kingship as old as Solomon, herders and farmers and hunters and sculptors; Brazil and Cuba and Haiti, with recurrent themes but profound differences. Johnnetta speaks of drawing on her background in anthropology to bring sisters from throughout the lands of the African