Constructing a Nervous System: A Memoir

I

I stood in a bright, harsh light. The stage was bare.

I extended my arm—no, flung, hurled it out—pointed an accusatory finger, then turned to an unseen audience and declared,

THIS IS THE WOMAN WITH ONLY ONE CHILDHOOD.

It was part of the night’s dream work. And I was rattled when I woke up, for I’d been addressing myself. My tone was harsh and my outstretched arm with its accusing finger had the force of that moment in melodrama when the villain (hitherto successful in his schemes to ruin the heroine’s life) is revealed, condemned and readied for punishment.

—

I understood what I had to do.

At the end of his stage show, Bill Bojangles Robinson would look up at the lighting booth and shout, Give me a light. My Color.

Pause. Then

Blackout.

—

When the light returned, I knew it was time to construct another nervous system.

For most of my adult life I’d felt that to become a person of complex and stirring character, a person (as I put it) of inner consequence, I must break myself into pieces—hammer, saw, chisel away at the unworthy parts—then rebuild. It was laborious. Like stone masonry.

And on the stone masonry model the human self says go on. Admires itself for saying go on, and proceeds to…Go On.

As I went on, I grew dissatisfied. This edifice was too fixed. I wanted it to become an apparatus of mobile parts. Parts that fuse, burst, fracture, cluster, hurtle and drift. I wanted to hear its continuous thrum. THRUM go the materials of my life. Chosen, imposed, inherited, made up. I imagined it as a nervous system. But not the standard biological one. It was an assemblage. My nervous system is my structure of recombinant thoughts, memories, feelings, sensations and words.

—

Repeat After ME:

It’s time to construct another nervous system

—

You write criticism. You write memoir.

What will be your tactics, strategies, instruments for constructing this nervous system?

I keep carping and fussing, rearing up against the words critic and criticism. Such august, temperate words. They make me think Gertrude Stein was right, that nouns are boring because all they do is name things, and just naming names is alright when you want to call a roll but is it good for anything else. When you’re thrilled by a taffeta petticoat, a flying buttress, a sound chamber of notes and syllables—when an idea makes you feel as if the top of your head were being taken off—then abandon your too-temperate prose zone and keep writing criticism.

As for memoir, I keep attaching adjectives to it. Cultural memoir, temperamental memoir: What makes me so anxious? I want memoir and criticism to merge. Can they? And if so, how?

Read on.

—

There’s no escaping the primal stuff of memory and experience. Dramatize it, analyze it, amend it accidentally, remake it intentionally.

Call it temperamental autobiography.

—

Be a critic of your own prose past. These words for instance.

A young novelist asked me: Why did you choose to write criticism?

I wanted to make my way to the center of American culture, and find ways to de-center it, I told her.

Why did you choose to write memoir? she asked.

I wanted to make my way to my own American center and find language for the fractures there, I answered.

—

These words aren’t wrong, and they’ve worked to set the mood for readings. They’re too smooth, though, too graciously incantatory. Too designed to show the valiant journey, the honorable aim. The rule assigned and assumed. (Stand up especially straight, please, you are one of the first black/woman critics here, you are among the first of your race and gender to steadily publish reviews in a cluster of widely read periodicals from the 1970s into the twenty-first century.) Writing to honor and claim a permanent place for the arts and cultures of non-white non-males and non-heterosexuals; writing to savor and display your ease with them all, including the arts and cultures of white male heterosexuals. Writing to display your own gifts and skills.

Is this commemoratively grand? Tonally accurate, though: those times and those settings required touches of self-protective grandeur. You were always calculating—not always well—how to achieve; succeed as a symbol, and a self.

—

Remember: Memoir is your present negotiating with versions of your past for a future you’re willing to show up in.

· · ·

On a stage filled with bodies, the adult orphans speak the last lines of the family play.

Exeunt alone.

Prepare to enter a new play.

—

As I write this I worry that I’m about to hurl raw intimacies at new, uncommitted readers. If I delay, though, I’m coddling myself. And pretending it’s for their benefit.

2018: To My Mother

Dearest Irma,

You died four years ago. But the process of your dying continues. I domesticate it as best I can. I don’t feel Romaine Brooks–ish now that you’re actually dead. In my bleak, sere days I would whisper or silently intone her dreadful words—My dead mother gets between me and life. I speak as she desires. I act as she commands. I didn’t often add the last words, To me she is the root enemy of all things. I’d memorized them but you weren’t the root enemy—I was. You were crucial source material for my self-imposed deprivations.

I must have feared your judgment of the world I was making. Of what in it wasn’t part of the world you’d curated for me with such meticulous and invincible ardor.

Why did you stop talking to anyone in your last year? You had not lost your mind. And when you could still speak, why did you refuse to answer when I asked you if you thought about Denise? Your oldest child, my only sister. I’d just asked if you thought about your mother: you whispered yes. Your mother had been dead for more than sixty years. Denise had been dead for only three. So you turned your face to the wall. Refused to share your grief with me. My first-born, you’d murmured, when I told you she was dying. Maybe you were returning to the private life you’d shared with Denise for those first three years. As the prime intruder on that intimacy, my presence was not required.

You should have died before I had to witness your full descent. No speech. No movement except for your bladder leaking into your diapers. Refusing, even when you still had words, to share your death with me.

We are continually bobbing and slipping out of the way of our would be re-possessors.

Amelia Etta Johnson, The Nations from a New Point of View, 1903

These re-possessors become our own griefs and quarrels.

Margo Jefferson, The Psyche from a New Point of View

—

I’ve misquoted Mrs. Johnson. Willfully, insistently misquoted her, ever since I read and copied out these words at least five years ago. This indefatigable Race Woman wrote repressers, not re-possessors; repressers as in vindictive white people eager to subdue black people by force. Why—even when I reread the original passage—did my cognitive skills insist on turning repressers into re-possessors? Re-possessors had a sharper note of menace, of ruthless conquest, of violence done to others, then taken in and done to oneself. A final death in a family will make a nervous system go dystopian.

···

Death rouses the big emotions. But they have to adapt to the small scale of ordinary life—a life "unromantic as Monday morning, when all who have work wake with the consciousness that they must rise and betake themselves thereto."* Your workaday monsters are grief and anger. Whatever’s at hand—inconvenience, grudge, vexation—they rise and betake themselves.

*Charlotte Brontë, Shirley

—

Supple, wily Monster of Mine:

You wait for one of those mornings when I’ve slept badly and wake up thinking ill of myself in a fretful way.

I go to the kitchen. I can’t find the mug I want. I go to the bathroom. The container with my sterilized cotton balls is stuck. I’m furious: What did Carmen do when she came to clean yesterday—did she break the mug and not tell me? How did she close the container so tightly I may have to take a screwdriver to it?

I’m seized by a thought:

If I were a white slave mistress, this is the moment I’d call her into my presence, rail, slap her, throw an object—maybe the container—at her and warn her she’d be whipped if it happened again.

If I were a high-handed white woman in New York City, I’d chastise her sharply the next time she came here. If I were angry enough, maybe I’d fire her.

If I were a high-handed woman of color—black, brown or beige—I would do the same thing. And decide to hire a white cleaning woman so I could feel less guilty about my tone.

I get the container open with no screwdriver and no damage to my nails. It had probably tightened when Carmen polished it. I find the mug, which I’d left in the dishwasher, instead of in the cabinet with other mugs.

If I’d called Carmen and spoken sharply to her, would I apologize now? On the phone or in person? If I apologized, would she stay on? I know she needs the work. How would we proceed? Would we perform our old cordialities or adapt slightly—she more distant or more anxiously obliging, I more distant or more strenuously gracious?

Monster says, We’re done with that. Let’s move on. Today’s clearly a day for you to feel blocked and impeded, a coward in work and love; resenting duty; suspecting pleasure. My job is to make sure you don’t hold just anyone or anything responsible for your state of mind. You’re an orphan now. It’s time to blame your dead parents, and to do so properly you must be more nuanced. You must be literary.

Monster prompts me with a quote from the wise and balanced Willa Cather.

Always in every family there is this double life…secret and passionate and intense…Always in her mind, each member is escaping, running away, trying to break the net which circumstance and her own affections have woven around her…

I need my own variations.

My dead mother gets between me and life. You’ve said that already, says Monster. Don’t be repetitive. Your emotions repeat themselves but your allusions shouldn’t.

Daddy, Daddy you bastard, I’m through.

Sylvia Plath is overused, says Monster.

—

My parents enthralled me. My mother’s ubiquitous charm, my father’s artful dignity—they enthralled me.

Monster says: Your mother didn’t love you enough to want you less than perfect.

Monster says: Your father didn’t love you enough to prefer you to his depression.

Monster says: You’ve worked hard, you’ve left your mark. Maybe it’s time to die. You’re past the prime you wasted so much of. Why don’t you join your parents? Imagine their faces as you walk toward them. They’ll cry out, Oh Margo, we’re so happy to see you!

Then I realize…that if any of this were possible—this Sunday School afterlife—they would be furious. My mother would cry: How dare you waste your talents and achievements like this? All our work! My father would look at me in silence, unutterably disappointed by this failure of honor and character.

And they would join arms, turn their backs and walk slowly away holding their heads high.

· · ·

NOW IT’S TIME TO EMBRACE GRIEF’S INEVITABLE, SOMETIMES USEFUL BIPOLAR SWING!

—

I offer No Good Daughter Now, after Ethel Waters’s No Man’s Mamma, recorded in 1925 to a cheeky, joyous thirty-two-bar tune.

Waters Verses

I can say what I like, I can do what I like,

I’m a gal who is on a matrimonial strike.

Heigh ho! I’m