I Dwell in Possibility. Toni McNaron

sent your book to me sometime during 1993 after I had come to speak at the University of Minnesota-Minneapolis, where you were teaching. You were too shy, you told me years later, to give it to me in person.

      We had met as professors and critics, feminists reinterpreting Virginia Woolf’s life and works in those heady years during the 1970s and 1980s. We attacked the literary critical establishment for what we believed to be gross misrepresentations of her work, and we tried to change old ways of thinking about Woolf as a dreamy, apolitical writer of incomprehensible novels. You changed how readers thought about Woolf’s sexuality by writing about her lesbianism—Quentin Bell, her nephew and biographer, had proclaimed her sexually timid and frigid; he did not view her love of women and her physical relationships with them as sexual. I was writing about Woolf as an incest survivor and how this had profoundly affected her life and work—Bell had written that her adverse response to sexual abuse showed she was “neurotic.” Our work provoked and enraged, but also persuaded; we believed our work was righteous.

      We knew one another then as colleagues, and corresponded, and respected each other’s scholarly work. Yet, when we met in person, we did not speak much about our personal histories although our anthem was that the personal is political. Many feminist critics and scholars used this as a major axiom in our scholarly work. But I had kept the personal strictly personal. I wanted my work to stand on its own; I also feared that if reviewers of my work knew that I, too, was an incest survivor, they would fault my work as biased.

      So I didn’t know until I read your memoir how very much we had in common, though you were raised in Fairfield, Alabama, and I was raised in Hoboken, New Jersey. I didn’t know that our class backgrounds were similar, that our mothers were disappointed in us because we both rejected traditional “feminine” behavior models and developed rough, wrangling personalities to survive. That you, too, were a sexual rebel—you, with girls; I, with boys.

      And no, I am not sorry that I learned about how much alike we were by reading your life. I loved that I got to know you as Virginia Woolf had initially come to know Vita Sackville-West—by reading her books. Fancy that: a woman like me, a second generation Italian American born into the working class, learning about the life of someone she knew through her work. It seemed a measure of how far I had come in the world, reading the book of a person I actually knew.

      When your memoir first arrived, I read it immediately. I felt instinctively that I needed to read it and that it would have an important impact upon my understanding of the entire genre. I was planning to write my own memoir and also to teach Cross-Cultural Memoir at Hunter College in New York City. I believed that reading a book about your life in Jim Crow’s South and the development of your lesbian identity would provoke important classroom discussion about racism and sexual identity. Many of my students came from the South; many were gay, and your book, I believed, would prompt reexaminations of my students’ lives. I wanted to teach your book alongside Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Esmeralda Santiago’s When I Was Puerto Rican, Mary Crow Dog’s Lakota Woman, Richard Rodriguez’s Hunger of Memory, Le Ly Hayslip’s When Heaven and Earth Changed Places, and Meena Alexander’s Fault Lines—all works that address the impact of culture upon the formation of personality.

      As I read I Dwell in Possibility, I saw how important your book would be in helping my students better comprehend their own lives—how gender roles are taught, how it feels to be an outsider, how we deal with sexual desire, how our lives can be creative responses to our circumstances. I saw, too, that reading your memoir would help them understand the larger historical events that you witnessed in Birmingham, Alabama, during political actions by black citizens—nonviolent protests that had been violently disbanded by Eugene “Bull” Connor’s enforcement of Jim Crow laws. Never before had I read about these incidents from the point of view of a white southern woman who had actually seen and lived through them, though I had read much history about nonviolent integration efforts in the South, as had many of my students.

      I also began to realize that I Dwell in Possibility could be an important model for my own writing. Unlike so many memoirists, you situated your life in the context of the historical moment into which you were born. Reading your book gave me a new perspective on what growing up white and female in Jim Crow’s Alabama had felt like; without flinching, you described what it was like to be a silent witness and reluctant heir to racism. You learned about describing moments of being—what living feels like to the person living the life—I know, from reading Virginia Woolf. You showed the reader what it was like (and, by extension, what it meant) to have as a child African American friends whose names you never knew; what it felt like not to conform to southern dictates of how a white girl should act; what it was to be locked into the often brutal reality of race relations in the United States.

      Simply stated, I Dwell in Possibility made me rethink my life and reflect more deeply on the impact growing up during World War II in an Italian American working-class neighborhood had on me. You helped me to discard the notion that my life began and ended within the confines of my immediate family. I would have to excavate the meaning of being born an Italian American woman in the 1940s as you had excavated the meaning of being born a white woman in the late 1930s in Alabama. In writing about my family, I had to write about the history of my family. In following your example, I had to take the lessons of feminism and apply them to the study of my own life. This would become the most significant challenge of my writing life, changing forever the way I understood myself, my ethnicity, my parents, and my grandparents’ history as Southern Italian peasants forced by poverty and repression to emigrate to the United States.

      Writing narratives of growth and development as if they were played out solely within the confines of the nuclear family, without referring to the political world beyond the home, without taking into account what “family” means within a culture, misrepresents the lived life. The subtext of such memoirs—and I had read many—was clear: you become who you are because of your family. Period. But your work, and the other memoirs I read in preparation for my course, showed me that the development of all children is profoundly affected by their times, by the impact of being born into families that had lived through wartime, that had been born poor and despised, that had endured slavery, that had suffered attempts to exterminate their people—or that had borne anguished yet privileged witness to these events.

      You showed your readers that the only way we can know ourselves fully is to understand the formation of our personalities in the context of political history, in the context of racism and classism, sexism and homophobia. Although, as critics, we wrote about our subjects in the context of their times, you were among the first of our generation to write openly about yourself, about your life in the context of Jim Crow’s South—indeed, yours was the inaugural memoir in the highly influential Feminist Press Cross-Cultural Memoir Series. In so doing, you disturbed, too, essentialist stereotypes about white womankind in the South.

      Feminism teaches that the deepest meaning of our lives lies in discovering the connections among the personal, the historical, and the political. This paradigm, when applied to the writing of one’s own life, demands a different kind of courage; here, you were pioneer and model. As we both learned, courage comes as you do the work, not before you do the work. Writing our lives enables us to witness our survival. But writing our lives also forces us to face those painful and unpleasant truths that we learn about ourselves and about our families, caregivers, forebears, and natal communities: our capacity for cruelty and compliance; our inability to act heroically; our tolerance of injustice.

      I knew from reading I Dwell in Possibility that I would have to write about some difficult, heretofore unspeakable issues in my family: my mother’s depression, my sister’s suicide, my father’s violence, my sexual abuse by a caregiver. I also learned that I would have to write about my failings. Your work provided an example of enormous courage, for you wrote about difficult matters—your relationships with the black women who worked for your family as housekeepers, your awakening as a lesbian, your anguish at not acting to stop the racist violence that you witnessed—all told, your understanding of what it means to be born into the paradox of racial privilege and sexual repression.

      Your work even suggested