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Foreword

Making the Possible, Probable:

A Long Overdue Thank-You to Toni McNaron

July 11, 2001

Dear Toni,

This is the letter I should have written years ago when I first encountered your miraculous I Dwell in Possibility. At the time, I was reading as many memoirs as I could to prepare for the writing of my first memoir, Vertigo. You had 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 the form mine might take. I liked that you broke your work into chapters, that you used titles for each—“Out of the Nest,” “First Lessons,” “Child’s Play”—that also functioned as metaphors. Somehow, thinking of a life as composed of chapters made the writing of my own life, the understanding of it, seem possible. And so, the chapter titles for my own work—“Combat Zones,” “Vertigo,” “Safe Houses”—slowly came into my consciousness. I began to scribble chapter headings as I read your memoir, long before I would write all that needed to follow.

In 1995, I am rereading I Dwell in Possibility for my course Cross-Cultural Issues in Memoir. As I reread your account of your alcoholism, I realize that I haven’t yet described my own alcoholism as a teenager although I am very near the end of my writing.

Urged on by your account, I begin to pen mine. Alongside notes about your work, one of my diary entries from this time reads: I also want to write about how much I drank. And another: I wrote the scene of me on the yellow line of the highway, passed out drunk. Susan [my best friend] standing above me, trying to take care of me.

From there, I begin exploring the reasons for my own alcoholism, coming to understand that yours was, in part, a response to your experience as a passive witness to atrocity; that mine was, in part, a response to the sexual abuse by a caregiver I experienced as a child. Linking these events—between and within our lives—explained what had been, for me, the formerly inexplicable: my alcoholism, hypervigilance, chronic illness.

As Virginia Woolf wrote, no book is a single birth. Each is related to other books and must be so understood. And so it is with your book and my book.

It is the spring of 1995, and I am walking to Hunter College. I carry in my briefcase a copy of I Dwell in Possibility, which I will be teaching. This day, like each day I walk to Hunter, I am edgy and careful, not knowing what I will encounter upon my arrival. For several days during the semester, the college had been surrounded by police vans in anticipation of another student protest against budget cuts and tuition hikes. Throughout the early spring, there have been sit-ins and teach-ins; recently there was a march and a peaceful protest of students and faculty in front of City Hall. During the demonstration, protesters were corralled closer and closer together by mounted police. The periphery is sealed. No one can leave. I thought they wanted us to stampede so they could fire upon us, a colleague later tells me. We were all shouting, “Stay calm, stay calm,” but we felt like we were suffocating. I thought that many of us would die.

I turn the corner and see a phalanx of police in full riot gear with bandoleers of bullets across their chest. They are ranged across Lexington Avenue, the street that fronts our college, and they are holding automatic weapons.

The policemen are there not because there is a student demonstration, but because there might be one. Rudolph Giuliani is mayor, and his administration is dedicated to maintaining law and order. My students and I are experiencing, firsthand, what this means. Many of us feel like we are living in a police state where one false move, even during peaceful protest, can result in carnage.

The students’ favorite protest strategy is to form a human barricade across Lexington Avenue, the downtown traffic artery that fronts the main entrance to Hunter College. It is a very clever and very successful strategy because stopping traffic on just this one block snarls traffic all along Manhattan’s East Side.

Even when traffic isn’t stopped, student leaders set up portable microphones and give speeches, explaining how the proud tradition of free tuition at the City University (of which Hunter is a part) has been abandoned. The student leaders remind us that investing in the education of the city’s poor makes good economic sense long-term. They excoriate the city’s leadership for its hostility toward the City University, which can only be explained by racism and classism.

I am proud of my activist students. I have some of them in my classes, for I always teach literature courses that discuss issues of race, class, and gender, and student activists gravitate to these courses. This is an important time in the City University’s history, when the ability of poor students—my students—to afford a quality education is being severely threatened. I know that if tuition hikes go through, many of my students will have to postpone their education or curtail it completely.

That I am teaching I Dwell in Possibility during this historical moment in my life, in my students’ lives, enables us to understand your work more deeply and to understand our own historical moment. Through your work we come to feel what it is like to live through and bear witness to violence as you did. Many of us are nervous; many of us are having nightmares. My body has broken out in enormous hives. Many students come to me during office hours to discuss whether they will take part in protests; many come telling me they feel they are in danger.

At the beginning of the semester, before we read your work, we talk about the kind of people who might write memoir. The students tell me that only important people—leaders who participate in history and important events—write memoirs. Ordinary people like themselves, who live their lives largely on the periphery of events, have nothing important to tell the world. Even my most activist students do not believe they have important narratives to record.

One reason I teach memoir is to obliterate this false notion. To show my students that each life has a story. That each life is lived in history. That each life merits recording—insights so intrinsic to I Dwell in Possibility.

In my diary I wrote: The students loved Toni McNaron’s memoir. They were upset by her description of what happened to black families during the civil rights movement in Birmingham. We discussed how President Clinton spoke about how hate groups and hate speech fuel violence. And what a scary country this is and always has been, some of my students said. Founded on racism and exploitation. One student, whose family was from the South, said she was glad to read this history from this point of view; that she liked seeing such a frank examination of racism from a white person’s perspective. We applied the insights from McNaron’s book to what is happening at Hunter now.

During that semester, my students wrote you letters of appreciation. They told you that reading your work allowed them to think about their lives in a new way—that they, like you, lived in a historical moment; and that being a “silent witness” to history means that you have participated in it, too—a paradox you unlocked for them.

All this they learned when they read that unforgettable moment you wrote about. It was on a Sunday in the summer of 1956: a group of black families brought their lunches to the park near the Birmingham Public Library for an event planned by the NAACP to integrate the city’s open spaces. You witnessed “a crowd of rowdy whites” heckling and cursing the families, you saw them becoming increasingly more abusive, and then the police cars arrived, and you had hope that the picnicking families would be protected; but this was Jim Crow’s South, and so, instead, the police unleashed their dogs and they corralled the people and terrorized them, the children too, for half an hour, and you saw a dog bite a woman’s buttocks, and the black people carted off to jail.

I stood, mute and paralyzed, you wrote.

And then, again, later in that summer, another group of black families came to the park, and this time the police hooked up power hoses to fire hydrants and turned them on the crowd. You saw grown men and women, children, blasted along the ground, their skin scraping, their bodies hurtling; you saw them choked and blinded by the water; you saw mothers crazed with terror at the sight of their little ones being hurt. And, as you wrote,

No white person had made a single move to stop this atrocity, including me.

Those moments in your life, and your memory of them, and your reflection upon them, forced you into thinking about what it means to be a silent witness to atrocity. And, importantly, all this forced you to think about your place in history, your responsibility, and your silence. Now, many years later, I am beginning a fourth memoir, about my Southern Italian grandparents, and returning to I Dwell in Possibility. I can only imagine where my third reading will take me.

When you like a book, Henry Miller said, write a letter to the writer, to the publisher, and to a friend: reading a book begins a conversation. And reading important writing that has had an impact upon your life puts you in the author’s debt, and you have an ethical obligation to repay it.

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