Composing a Life

woodlands that are still wild.

EIGHT
CARETAKING

    W HEN I WAS STAYING WITH JOHNNETTA , we would get up while it was still dark, put on shorts and running shoes, and do stretches and warming-up exercises on her front porch before setting off for an hour of energetic walking. Johnnetta was determined that if she was to be set visibly in the middle of the Spelman campus, one of the ways she would serve as a model for the students was to precede the dawn with physical exercise. We would start out by walking around the campus and then, with first light, go through the gate into the black neighborhood beyond, through one of the country’s earliest housing projects, which was separated from the young ladies of Spelman by a tall chain-link fence. Later, we would get an hour of interviewing done, and then Johnnetta would go to her office while painters and movers came in and out of the presidential mansion, displacing my work from room to room as I transcribed tapes.
    On Thursday, after we finished our morning session, Johnnetta left for New York to supervise the removal of furniture from her Brooklyn apartment and her office at Hunter College and to send two of her three sons off to visit their father, who was working in Zambia. On Friday, word came that she would be delayed. Late that night, she called and explained that her youngest, Che, had been hospitalized for an emergency appendectomy, and she would stay in New York at least until he was well enough to bring down to Atlanta. Of all her current commitments, I was the most portable, so I came to New York. We continued our walks on the streets of Brooklyn and our tapings in the partly dismantled apartment, while Johnnetta visited Che in the hospital and dealt with a
New York Times
interview. Johnnetta had all sorts of backup arrangements ready in New York, but as she said, “Somebody’s got to be the mommy.” In our society, it’s usually the mother who has to be the mommy, whatever other responsibilities she may have.
    The first week I was at Amherst as dean of the faculty, while I was going through the same process of unpacking and arranging in the evenings and trying in the daytime to find my way into the stacks of papers left by my temporary predecessor, my ten-year-old daughter Vanni had a biking accident that resulted in a concussion. At the hospital they said I could take her home, but that I should check her pupils once an hour through the night. The next day, she was pronounced fit to travel, and we drove to Cambridge to greet my husband. He was returning from a trip to Europe after having injured his leg in a sailing accident; he needed another emergency-ward visit and two days of nursing in bed. How many women can tell the same story of a sudden demand for caretaking? And how often does that demand crop up not a month or a year into a complex new role, but within the first few days, during the window of accident-proneness that seems to accompany every upheaval in family life?
    The caretaking has to be done. “Somebody’s got to be the mommy,” Individually, we underestimate this need, and as a society we make inadequate provision for it. Women take up the slack, making the need invisible as we step in to fill it. The ethologist Konrad Lorenz used to talk about the number of eggs laid by the same species of songbird when nesting at different latitudes. As you go farther north, the hours of daylight in summer are longer, so a given parental pair could gather food adequate for a larger number of fledglings. As you go south, the available daylight decreases, as does the average number of eggs. For the songbirds, surviving and raising the next generation fill the entire day. What is amazing about humans is that we seem able to do so much else; yet much of what we do is caretaking in another form or involves tasks that would be done better if they were understood in that way.
    In this society, we habitually underestimate the impulse in men, women, and even children to care for one another and their need to be taken care of. In a multiplicity of forms, caretaking is part of the composition of almost every life. Because we have so elaborated the caretaking professions, we may not notice the amount of caretaking done by an artist with apprentices or by a chief of engineering or a college president; we fail to notice the aridity of these jobs when they do not involve care for others. A. A. Milne, in the nursery rhyme, understood the impulse in a three year