Audre never says she was influenced by [Virginia] Woolf ’s letters when writing Zami, and it may be a coincidence, but even if so, the coincidence expands to include the fact that Audre was not only writing a mythological life story for herself, she was writing intimately about her dear friend Genevieve and other friends who died before she wrote the book. And when she began to promote Zami, Audre repeatedly referred to it as “a novel” and to the primary character Audre as “the protagonist.”
Audre felt accountable to her entire generation, especially those women who were not able to write their own life stories. So she allowed her protagonist to experience things that may not have been part of her actual life, but were certainly experiences that she and her peers faced in the 1940s and ’50s. For the purposes of this biography, I read Zami as a window into the ways Lorde, as an author, thought about her own life context and a rich space for the discrepancies between living a life and mythologizing it for broader use. Sometimes I read Zami as a place where we can see Audre’s fantasies and her critical lens on what she lived through.
Augusta Baker had such a major impact on her that Audre remembered the librarian for the rest of her days. She credited her with the fact that she could read before she started school, and also with her later decision to go to graduate school for library science and become a librarian. Or as Audre wrote: “If that was the only good deed that lady ever did in her life, may she rest in peace. Because that deed saved my life.”
Augusta Baker was new at the library when Audre was a young child. She had applied for the job three times. She had not given up when the library director discarded her application twice. During her time at the library Augusta Baker would build the most impressive collection of children’s literature for young Black readers in the nation, now known as the James Weldon Johnson Reference Collection. By the 1970s, the collection included children’s literature by Lucille Clifton, June Jordan, and many others. She would rise in the ranks to become coordinator of children’s services, the first Black department head in the New York Public Library system. Eventually she compiled her own collections of children’s stories, indexes of books for Black children, and guidebooks on relevant librarianship and storytelling. Augusta Baker shaped the field of children’s literature as a whole when she became chair of the committees that awarded the Newbery and Caldecott Medals and president of the children’s division of the American Library Association.
Augusta Baker’s care and attention is part of what led young Audre to cherish and partially memorize that Mother Goose book. Baker believed that “Mother Goose should keep company with Shakespeare.” And she may not have known that she was nurturing a future New York State poet laureate but her philosophy was that “poetry is essential to the full development of the child.” Coming out of a storytelling tradition, she taught that poems should be “if possible, recited from memory and not read.” In her interactive library club, Augusta encouraged the children of Harlem to raise their voices and be heard, not only seen. She must have been the one who asked children direct questions like: “What do you think? How do you feel?”
“It is never too soon to speak poetry to a child,” Augusta Baker would say to her colleagues. And so she spoke poetry to little Audre. And Audre spoke back.
But in Rackham’s Mother Goose, Audre was faced with generations of British nursery rhymes that repeat the word “niggedly” over and over again, and present caricatures of “evil Jews.” This is a book that includes a call-and-response game that ends with the last person tricked into saying, “I am a monk-key.” Somehow the favorite Mother Goose poems of an illustrator, born in 1867, who describes his greatest struggle as the “thin times of the Boer war,” became a touchstone for a little Black girl of West Indian heritage in Harlem.
Augusta Baker may have had her own misgivings about Rackham’s Mother Goose. In her later work, she recommends other Mother Goose collections but never Rackham’s. However, this was the book of poems they had access to, this is the book of poems that Audre said she read, quite possibly the first book of poems she ever held. A large black book of strange poems attributed to a mythical Mother, illustrated and gathered by a European man, handed to Audre by a committed Black storyteller and librarian. And in Audre’s small hands, her face leaning in close, the collection became more than a treasury of children’s poems. It became a book of spells.
Excerpted from SURVIVAL IS A PROMISE: The Eternal Life of Audre Lorde by Alexis Pauline Gumbs. Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Copyright © 2024 by Alexis Pauline Gumbs. All rights reserved.