I Dwell in Possibility. Toni McNaron

      As significant as your book was to me and though I incurred a great debt in reading it, life intervened—parents became ill, a grand baby was born, teaching duties became overwhelming, writing deadlines loomed, illness descended—and I never did then what Henry Miller said we all must do. I never wrote you that letter of appreciation and thanks.

      Now, finally, I have been given a chance to repay the debt I have owed you these many years.

      Thank you, Toni, for writing I Dwell in Possibility.

       With love, and enormous appreciation,

       Louise DeSalvo

       Teaneck, New Jersey

       Preface

      In 1940, when I was about three, my mother planted a small magnolia tree in our backyard. It had come from a friend whose family lived in the heart of agricultural Alabama. This friend believed having the sapling would remind my mother of her childhood days in Selma.

      In all my young years of driving around the South, I never saw a magnolia tree growing in a black family’s yard or a black section of town. I concluded that even the trees, like the picture show, water fountains, restrooms, and library, were for “Whites Only.” In 1987, after I had been living in the North for over twenty years, I attended a National Women’s Studies Association conference held at Spelman College in Atlanta, Georgia. Founded in 1880, this black women’s college boasts stately buildings, open grounds, and a solid row of magnolias along its outer fence. As I walked onto campus the first evening, I remembered my earlier impressions of where they could grow.

      I caught my breath at their majesty: the trees rising conically, reaching for the sky, their waxy leaves so green as to appear almost black, their branches clotted all the way up with great white blooms. As a child, I believed some giant had placed the blooms among the leaves as a whimsical gesture.

      On the ground beneath one tree, I found several brilliant red seed cores from fallen flower heads, full of prickly whiskers that had once held graceful petals in place. In my hand, they were pulpy, and the whiskers sprang back softly when I pushed them against the center.

      Also on the ground were several petals from fallen blooms. Picking up one, now a deep ochre, I felt its succulent thickness and realized for the first time what helps keep the blooms intact for so long. These artful petals are actually useful, sucking in each afternoon’s rain, holding moisture against the next day’s relentless heat.

      The South and its signs are more complicated than I could know growing up in their midst. My growing up itself was more complicated than I sometimes constructed it. Perhaps, I thought, by studying myself as carefully as I had these magnolias, I could unearth my own mysteries.

      It all began when Sara Evans, a feminist colleague in history at the University of Minnesota, taped my memories of the civil rights movement in Birmingham. She enjoined me to write my story since I had been present at events of great historical moment. The project quickly broadened to include early memories of playing with black children, only later to be taught to feel superior to them. Once I had opened that door to my childhood, other powerful scenes crowded into my consciousness. Eventually I shifted from the original focus on race to a more open-ended exploration into the formation of the self I now consider “me.” As I explored my earliest memories of family and my gradual sense that we were different from the black families who lived so near us geographically, I soon found myself enmeshed in other central questions of my growing up: Why did my father call me “Son”? Why did my mother “protect” me from other children? Why did I never tell her the most important things about myself? I saw that the self that I was shaping differed significantly from the one my parents had imagined. I remembered a woman who felt confused and isolated, who was an alcoholic. Yet I also began to connect my developing creativity with a sense of myself as a sexual person, my emergence as a lesbian, and my passion for literature and teaching.

      The first edition of this memoir was more than six years in the making, while Part IV took more than ten months to create. That’s an incredibly long time for someone who prefers breaking through plaster walls to sweeping up the debris, washing or hanging out clothes to folding and putting them away, hatching a grand idea to tracing down footnotes or laboring on a third or fourth revision. Often I experienced great frustration, among other things, during this second writing process, thinking: People who liked the initial version will not want to buy or read this new expanded volume, so why am I working all summer to make it clearer? From all that transpired, however, it became clear that much of my story remained to be told, even parts already “covered” in the original edition. Now my part in the process is over, a fact that fills me with excitement and satisfaction. My lingering discomfort with the work’s being read by strangers, however, comes from my sure knowledge that others in this account would tell different stories from the ones that I record. My fantasies are wild: “Someone will sue me,” even though everyone in my family, except my sister Betty, is long dead; “Betty will never speak to me again, deny me my mother’s antiques, turn me from her door when I visit,” though she has adjusted to my telling her that I am a lesbian, an alcoholic, an autobiographer, and someone who found growing up in our family painful as well as wonderful.

      None of these things will happen. Instead, I will live with my periodic concern that I have been unfair, lopsided, cruel, vindictive. The act of putting my life onto paper has allowed me to see it more distinctly, both in its worst and best lights. I accept that it is populated by individuals who were who they had to be rather than who I might have wanted them to be. By facing their ghosts, I stand strangely less encumbered by their ideas of me. I think of Virginia Woolf and Maxine Hong Kingston, and keep coming out of the shadows.

      Toni McNaron

       Acknowledgments

      Because this work has been fostered by so many, I feel compelled to acknowledge some of the most important of them: the Graduate School of the University of Minnesota for a summer research grant that allowed me to make much more rapid progress than normally possible; my brother-in-law, Leon, who helped me purchase a home computer without which the numerous revisions, full of “block moves,” would have proved daunting; Anita Kunin for providing me with photocopies of the early manuscript, thereby facilitating my finding my publisher; my women’s writing group for reading and responding to early portions of the first two sections; Chris Gordon, Judy Remington, and Ellie Siegel for reading manuscript drafts and giving me essential editorial suggestions; and my tireless editors—Kathy Casto, who lent clarity and good humor to my work on the original memoir; and Jocelyn Burrell, whose close and demanding reading of the expanded manuscript led me to produce a more trenchant and honest version.

      Florence Howe’s expert editorial skills, together with her extraordinary generosity, have challenged and touched me all along the way. I am indebted to my dear friends and colleagues, Shirley Garner and Mimi Sprengnether, not only for their quick and sharp responses to specific sections but more importantly for their unflinching belief in me and in the value of this project.

      Finally, I acknowledge my family members—Blue and Slate, our dog and cat, who kept me company many a late night or early morning as I struggled to articulate what memory was offering me; Minna and Sophie, our current and magical cats who sit and chew draft pages to encourage me to keep at it; and Susan Cygnet, my partner, who has helped me learn that intimacy is worth the effort and risk involved, spurring me to voice my ideas and feelings even, or most especially, when I feel reluctant to do so.

       Part I

      Top: birthday party, 1941; bottom: the author’s mother at Christmas, 1963. Courtesy of Toni McNaron.