Talk Stories Read Free Page B

writer that I am now if not for a set of events. George took me many places with him, sometimes just for my companionship, sometimes just to feed me. One night he took me to a restaurant that was on Twenty eighth Street between Lexington and Park Avenue, and that restaurant served Lebanese food. I said something, I do not remember what, but it pleased George and he laughed in the biggest of his big laughs and he said that he would take me to meet Mr. Shawn and I did not know then who Mr. Shawn was but I agreed to it all the same.
    It was a day in April, a cold day, and I wore not clothes for
comfort, warmth, but clothes that I liked: I wore a pink-and-white silk dress, a dress that had been fashionable in the 1930s, and my brown jacket, the one I usually wore with jodhpurs. If I can’t remember what Mr. Shawn looked like when I first met him that spring in 1974, it is only because he looked the same to me as when I saw him for the last time in November of 1992, and not long after that he died. At that lunch I was asked to place my order first, out of courtesy, of course, but I did not know that, and I ordered the most expensive meal on the menu, because either I was hungry right then or I did not know when I would have such a good meal again. I was quite ashamed that George ordered something that cost half as much as mine did and Mr. Shawn had only tea and a slice of cake, and when I saw what they had ordered I really thought it was because my own meal had cost so much that there wasn’t enough money left for them to eat properly.
    It was because George loved Mr. Shawn that he wanted me to meet Mr. Shawn and introduce Mr. Shawn to someone who might write for him and in that way give Mr. Shawn some amusement, some joy; I felt then, and still do now, that George loved me and wanted to bring me into that part of his world. I loved George then and know that I still do now. Mr. Shawn did not think that I would make a Talk reporter, but he told George that I should try. It was five months later that I wrote my first piece, but it was only after I wrote that piece, only after Mr. Shawn read it and gave it a form, a life, that I knew it was writing, my writing, and it was through that piece of writing and Mr. Shawn’s acceptance of it that I came to
know writing, the thing that I was doing, the thing I would do, that thing that I now do, writing; it was through that first experience with giving Mr. Shawn some thoughts of my own on paper that I came to be the person writing that I am now.
    I was born in St. John’s, Antigua, and I spent the first sixteen years of my life there. Shortly after I turned sixteen years of age, I was sent to America by my family to work and earn money to support them. I did not like any of it at all. I did not like being sent away, and then I did not like sending them the money I had earned. By the time I met George, I talked about my family all the time and in such an obsessive way that I must have seemed insane. George did not think so, Mr. Shawn did not think so. That first piece I wrote was about the carnival that immigrants from the English-speaking West Indies re-created in Brooklyn, New York. But to say wrote is misleading, for I did not think I was writing; I made some notes, observations of what I saw in the days before the actual carnival, and then I wrote down my impression of the carnival itself. The two things were separate, notes and observations, and I thought that when I gave them to Mr. Shawn he would have George rewrite the notes and make them sensible. Instead, notes and observations were printed, just as I had written them, and it is the just-as-I-had-written-them quality that makes me to this day suspicious of people, editors, giving me suggestions about how I should change one thing or another when I write.
    As far as I knew then, I wanted to be a writer; as far as I knew then, I wanted to be that thing in particular, a writer, I
did not want to be myself, I did not know