Composing a Life

intellectual colleagues, was shortly thereafter rejected by the committee searching for a new chancellor. He subsequently resigned from the administration and returned to teaching. Like me, Johnnetta found herself no longer at home where she had lived and worked, in her case for twelve years. But she moved out slowly, first returning to teaching at U. Mass., then taking a year’s leave and renting her house while she went to teach at Hunter College in New York, and finally resigning from U. Mass. Hunter felt good.
    When the call came to become president of Spelman College, it felt even better. Johnnetta described her arrival at Spelman at age fifty in the same language of tentative and then joyous self-recognition that Joan had used in speaking of herself as a dancer. We were sitting looking out of a bedroom window in Reynolds Cottage, and the bells began to ring in Sisters’ Chapel next door, whose name refers to two white sisters, in whose honor it was donated, but echoes today with the significance of sisterhood to black women. “Those bells go deep inside of me,” Johnnetta said. Then she grinned, intoning, “and on the stroke of eight. . . .” She paused.
    “On the stroke of eight,” I said, throwing away my intention to start the interview with childhood memories, “I want you to start talking about what it feels like to be here now as president of this place, and how it fits into your life.”
    “I have a ritual that I may cease to participate in,” she answered slowly, “but I need that ritual right now. When I awaken in the morning, before I leave my bed, I tell myself again that I am the president of Spelman College. I need that ritual for several reasons. One is that I haven’t spent a great deal of my time imagining myself in this sort of a place, in a presidency, so that my image of myself really was not as a college president. My image of myself was to do things beyond being a professor, sure, but it didn’t have much reality to it. Now I’m going very quickly through imagining and being. So every morning I have to wake up and tell myself that I’m the president of Spelman College, and then I have to understand again what kind of institution this is.
    “On the other hand, the first few days have gone . . . I’m tempted to use that word that any anthropologist ought to be suspicious of—it feels so ‘natural.’ There’s a passage in one of Andrew Salkey’s poems, a woman in Cuba telling her kin in Jamaica that life is tough but things are getting better, and then she ends by saying, ‘but you know, I feel more like my natural self.’ An element of that is seeing myself mirrored in Spelman. One is always mirrored, but here that process is especially meaningful. Spelman is an institution for black women, so this mirroring is really quite literal. And all the tools of our trade, of anthropology, are part of it too. This place is absolutely overflowing with history. You just can’t be here without encountering what so much of black America is about. So there’s the mirroring of self that is part of falling in love, and also that particular juncture of passion and intellect that can be part of falling in love.”
    In the last twenty years, we have become accustomed to seeing women make new beginnings when their children leave home. It will take a while to realize how often men also make such new beginnings and how many women make them more than once. We are like cats with nine lives, landing once again on our feet. One of the things we have in common is a reluctance to discard the past and a willingness to look back for whatever may still fit, like a line of Arabic poetry pulled up from memory from twenty years before.
    Johnnetta and Alice, the two women in the group who have been divorced, have both had important and lasting relationships with their ex-husbands. “Divorce sounds like such a total affair,” Johnnetta said, “but really you’re only ending certain parts of certain relationships. Robert is not divorced from his sons and Robert and I are not divorced in a total sense. So you continue to work out all the other parts of the relationships. You continue some and you re-create others. When we divorced, Robert’s work was disrupted by the upheavals in Grenada, so when we came to the final arrangements, my lawyer said they were an embarrassment. ‘Lady, you’re gonna run me out of the profession!’”
    No wonder the lawyer was upset. For Johnnetta approached the