Herself Read Free Page B

the bars of heaven, it is for shaking his fist at the hills of grace, and shouting “ I expect to know everything!” Adding as he falls, “A prince I know I’m not.”
    Lucifer takes his hand, or hers, and says, “Be a writer.”
    No stars fell when she was born. Yet she will address them.
    All through life she will waver, between that arrogance and that humility.
    Meanwhile, as I begin to practice the word-life, and both to learn and fear its postures, what gnaws at me most is the gap between words and action. Given the age I live in, I am bound to see that gap mainly in political terms; indeed it takes an effort of mind, even now, to recall that other ages have seen this same gap solely in terms of religion—the distance between word and action there .
    By this time, perhaps 1951, I had accumulated a certain amount of sub-political experience. Most of it in an ancient field to which my time would give the modern name of “race relations.”
    Back in the Relief Bureau (as both we and the clients called the Department of Public Welfare) many of my “co-workers”—a name slid over to us from sub-Marxist doctrine—had been black, as was my boss supervisor, Herbert Rountree—like so many of the middle-to-upper staff a trained social worker recruited from “private” welfare work to public—in his case from the Urban League. (Precinct heads were usually political appointees.) When I waltzed with him at an office party, my background silently waltzed with me:—On the one side, the Southern paternalism of my father, whose voice, when he spoke of Awnt Nell, the mammy, who had “raised” him, still shook with filial feeling—in the exact timbre, I now realize, with which he spoke of my grandmother. On the other side, my mother’s murmured “ Die Schwartze !”—which was the way German Jewesses of her day warned the family not to talk of something-or-other in front of the maid. Barring an Ethiopian rabbi my father claimed once to have met, and Cyril, the West Indian elevator boy who had once coached me in Latin, educated blacks were unknown to them. And except for two handpicked brown girls who had been at Barnard—to me.
    I felt that Mr. Rountree’s large, gently astute eyes could see this, right down to my backbone, on which his hand was placed with a formality entirely to do not with race but with waltz. Thirty years later perhaps, and I Wasper and blonder, we might have had to sleep together to show our empathy over the world’s hangups. As it was, I gave him a provincial New York City girl’s peculiar confidence. I wanted to give him something. “Want to know something funny?” It had surprised me. “Until I went into the field, I never knew that there were dumb Jews!”
    Behind me now are the years between, the early 1940s, spent barnstorming small industrial cities: Wilmington, Elmira, Binghamton, and larger: Rochester, Detroit—in the wake of an engineer husband. Engineers then (and perhaps now) are among the most conservative middle-class elements. As young family men, often with a holy distaste for cities, which takes no thought of what sins their own profession might be committing there, they make straight for the safer suburbs, in which all the prejudices—anti-Jew and black, anti-crowd and even anti-art—are spoken of as entirely natural. These men, one collegiate step above the foundry and the furnace, have little of the rough-and-ready about them, often not even manual dexterity, and none of the individual workman’s craft-guild or underdog independence. Instead, they take having a boss for granted, buy cars and houses of a grade deferentially lower, just as in the famous Fortune magazine study of pecking-orders in monolith industry, subscribe healthily to the theme that General Motors—or Eastman Kodak or U.S. Rubber— is America, and in general are the Eagle Scouts of the corporate image. (Who, by and large, seldom made it to very top executive. This daughter of a lone, cranky but