Composing a Life

windows, and a table that can seat a dozen people, but as often as not, the table is set with cardboard containers of seafood and pasta salads and plastic soda bottles.
    When Johnnetta came to Spelman, she came to live alone in Reynolds Cottage, for none of her three sons expect to live here. The youngest, Che, was still in high school, and he stayed on in Johnnetta’s New York apartment with his older brother David to finish his senior year.
    Reynolds Cottage bears the scars of family living left by Johnnetta’s predecessors, reminding me of the ambiguous meaning of home. Home is the main workplace for many women; it is a refuge of relaxation for very few. For Johnnetta, Reynolds Cottage is a public place within which she has shaped a few spaces of privacy. The long downstairs living room is for formal entertaining; across the hall there is a more intimate sitting room, decorated with African art. The furniture of the dining room, gleaming inlaid antiques donated by a member of the Rockefeller family a generation ago, has given way to Johnnetta’s own mahogany family pieces. Johnnetta’s private study is tucked under the eaves.
    I was struck by the similarity between the floor plan of this house and the floor plan of the president’s residence at Amherst College, built at approximately the same time. Every college campus across the country is a crystallization of ideas not only about education but also about the basic relationships—family and class—within the society. The furniture that belonged to Johnnetta’s black bourgeois parents in Jacksonville, Florida, will fit these rooms at Spelman, but it will be a complex task in this house to define a lifestyle that can fit the aspirations of young black women in today’s America. At Amherst, I used to puzzle about the assumptions that lay behind the presentation of the college presidency, supported both by servants and a “first lady of the college” who arranged the flowers and place cards for dinner parties and worked as a volunteer (although she was professionally qualified) in the campus art museum. It seemed an example of sad insensitivity for a coeducational institution to hold up a model of a lifestyle that could only be achieved in a society of affordable servants and dependent wives.
    One of the things that haunted me while I was at Amherst was the different meanings of “work” and “home” that hide behind what is becoming a false dichotomy for many men and women. The daily walks back and forth between my office and the college-owned house where I lived and the effort to harmonize my work in each made the notion of homemaking newly mysterious and provocative. Amherst College has a committee that is responsible for deciding many issues, including making decisions on tenure and promotions. During the fall semester, this committee is always overloaded, meeting for four or five hours at a time. These meetings were especially burdensome for me, since as dean, I had the responsibility of recording the deliberations, getting up at five the morning after a meeting to prepare the minutes before the rush for boots and oatmeal and the escaping school bus. Eventually, the committee would be driven to meet in the evenings; then, I would find myself at odds with my colleagues who preferred to take a two-hour break at home. I preferred to share a quick working supper that might allow us to adjourn at ten rather than eleven at night.
    My main concern was not when the meeting ended, but with the oxymoron for me of going home to relax. Going home for most of my colleagues meant putting up their feet, relaxing with a cocktail, having a meal served to them. Going home for me meant dealing with domestic emergencies and desperately trying to help with Latin homework in the kitchen while preparing a meal. For most women and for increasing numbers of men, home is a workplace, often for a second or third shift in a single day. It is still immensely difficult for a woman with a family to make the moment of walking through the front door a moment of release. There is real work involved in housekeeping, in providing food and shelter, but even if we learn to minimize the mechanics of these jobs, the tasks of homemaking cannot be eliminated for their value goes beyond the mechanical. We enact and strengthen our relationships by performing dozens of small practical rituals, setting the table, making coffee, raking the lawn—giving and receiving material tokens, even in a