Composing a Life

each other in our efforts to understand the environments we have worked in, even though we have seldom actually been colleagues. Today, it is he who reads what I write, chapter by chapter, and presses me to set my sights higher and work at the top of my talent; he makes the invisible contribution that has traditionally been made by women. Some of the dynamic in these relationships comes, as often happens between parent and child, from unrealized dreams. Barkev wonders whether he would have written more without a writer in the house; Joan picks up themes from Erik’s youth as an artist.
    These collaborative marriages, however productive and satisfying they may be, have to be renegotiated every time there is a move. There are likely to be assumptions about gender built into every new environment and indeed built into the move. Each of the overseas moves that Barkev and I have made together has carried the assumption that my work was an afterthought. He has been the expert imported from overseas; I have been “local hire,” picked up because I was available. After working with great satisfaction as equal colleagues in Africa, Johnnetta and Robert returned to the United States in 1962 with a new baby and Robert’s mentors helped to arrange a job for him at Washington State University at Pullman. Johnnetta found part-time and temporary jobs in the area, bearing a second child and taking years to complete her dissertation. At Washington, it was clear that Robert’s career was primary, and might have remained so except that Johnnetta was playing increasingly conspicuous roles in the emerging activism of the sixties. Eventually she got a regular appointment at Washington State, and in 1970 she was offered a tenured position at the University of Massachusetts and invited to play a key role in developing their Afro-American Studies program. To facilitate the move, the U. Mass. administration undertook to find Robert a temporary position in one of the other institutions in the Five-College Consortium, to give him a chance to find a permanent position. What they found was a visiting professorship in the economics department of Amherst College, but Robert never did find a permanent position in the area. This put him in an increasingly asymmetrical and culturally incongruous situation; when he left Massachusetts to work elsewhere, he abandoned Johnnetta and the marriage as well.
    I winced when I heard this story from Johnnetta. I was not at Amherst College at the time, but I knew enough of the attitudes still in existence when I arrived to know that any such arrangement was likely to be doomed. From the point of view of the department he was asked to join, Robert, hired as a spouse, was by definition inferior to Johnnetta, who was inferior to other U. Mass. faculty, and they in turn were inferior to all Amherst faculty. Furthermore, while U. Mass. includes radical ideas within the intellectual range of economics, Robert would have been judged by the Amherst economics department as flatly wrong in his intellectual and social convictions. Robert must have felt a bit as I felt in Iran during the revolution, working along at my job and wondering whether I would lose it more quickly because I was a foreigner, or because I was a non-Muslim, or because I was a woman. Any one of the three would eventually be fatal. Being a woman and black in America generally means one is two strikes down, but the time was right for Johnnetta. Johnnetta’s star kept rising, Robert’s was repeatedly stalled.
    A man and a woman may struggle for equality in their relationship, but external pressures continually destroy the balance. It’s not easy to stand together against the world. Society is casually unfair to women, expecting to pay them less and treating their work as intrinsically less valuable than the same job done by a man. But it is often pointedly punitive of men whose decisions do not fit that judgment. One reason that women still accept second-class citizenship is the fear that men who treat them as equals may become pariahs, relegated to well below second class. The academic world is notorious for the nastiness of the power games it plays, sometimes for such very small stakes. But in general, it is every man for himself—unless the issue is one that threatens their common dominance.
    In Iran, I had improvised and pieced together a number of different jobs, juggling the extra burdens of childcare and running a household in a strange