Hunger of Memory, page 15
My thoughts on the issue were printed. But by the late seventies the debate over affirmative action concerned itself only with the rights of white middle-class students. Opinions came from both sides. One heard from politicians and social activists and editorial writers. Finally, the justices of the Supreme Court rendered their judgment in the case of Bakke v. University of California. (Bakke was admitted to medical school.) But no one wondered if it had ever been possible to make higher education accessible to the genuinely socially disadvantaged.
V
In 1975, I was afraid of the success I knew I would have when I looked for a permanent teaching position. I accepted another one-year appointment at Berkeley in an attempt to postpone the good fortune awaiting me and the consequent issue it would finally force. But soon it came time: September, October, November—the traditional months of academic job-searching arrived. And passed. And I hadn’t written to a single English department. When one of my professors happened to learn this, late in November, he was astonished. Then furious. He yelled at me over the phone. Did I think that just because I was a minority, the jobs would come looking for me? Didn’t I realize that he and several other faculty members had already written letters on my behalf to various schools? Was I going to start acting like some other minority students he knew? They struggled for academic success and then, when they almost had it made, they chickened out. Was that it? Had I decided to fail?
I didn’t want to respond to his questions. I didn’t want to admit to him—thus to myself—the reason for my delay. I agreed to write to several schools. I wrote: ‘I cannot claim to represent socially disadvantaged Mexican-Americans. The very fact that I am in a position to apply for this job should make that clear.’ After two or three days, there were telegrams and phone calls inviting me to job interviews. There followed rapid excitement: a succession of airplane trips; a blur of faces and the murmur of soft questions; and, over somebody’s shoulder, the sight of campus buildings shadowing pictures I had seen, years before, when as a scholarship boy I had leafed through Ivy League catalogues with great expectations. At the end of each visit, interviewers would smile and wonder if I had any questions for them. I asked if they were concerned about the fact that I hadn’t yet finished my dissertation. Oh no, they said. ‘We regularly hire junior faculty members who complete their dissertation during their first year or two here.’ A few times I risked asking what advantage my race had given me over other applicants. But that was an impossible question for them to answer without embarrassing me. They rushed to assure me that my ethnic identity had given me no more than a foot inside the door, at most a slight edge. ‘We just looked at your dossier with extra care, and, frankly, we liked what we saw. There was never any question of our having to alter our standards. You can be certain of that.’
In the first part of January their offers arrived on stiff, elegant stationery. Most schools promised terms appropriate for any new assistant professor of English. A few made matters worse by offering more: an unusually large starting salary; a reduced teaching schedule; free university housing. As their letters gathered on my desk, I delayed my decision. I started calling department chairmen to ask for another week, another ten days—‘more time to reach a decision’—to avoid the decision I would have to make. (One chairman guessed my delay to be a bargaining ploy, so he increased his offer with each of my calls.)
At school, meanwhile, I knew graduate students who hadn’t received a single job offer. One student, among the best in the department, did not get so much as a request for his dossier. He and I met outside a classroom one day, and he asked about my prospects. He seemed happy for me. Faculty members beamed at the news. They said they were not surprised. ‘After all, not many schools are going to pass up the chance to get a Chicano with a Ph.D. in Renaissance literature.’ Friends telephoned, wanting to know which of the offers I was going to take. But I wouldn’t make up my mind. Couldn’t do it. February came. I was running out of time and excuses. I had to promise a decision by the tenth of the month. The twelfth at the very latest . . .
February 18. The secretaries in the English department kept getting phone calls; there were messages left on yellow slips of paper: Where was I? What had I decided? Have Professor Rodriguez return my call (collect) this evening. Please tell Richard Rodriguez that we must have a decision from him immediately because budget estimates for next year are due at the end of the week.
Late afternoon: In the office at Berkeley I shared with several other lecturers and teaching assistants, I was grading some papers. Another graduate student was sitting across the room at his desk. At about five, when I got up to leave, he looked over to tell me in a weary voice that he had some very big news. (Had I heard?) He had decided to accept a position at a faraway state university. It was not the job he especially wanted, he said. But he needed to take it because there hadn’t been any other offers. He felt trapped and depressed, since the job would separate him from his young daughter, who would remain in California with her mother.
I tried to encourage him by remarking that he was lucky at least to have found a position. So many others hadn’t. . . . But before I finished, I realized that I had said the wrong thing. And I anticipated what he would say next.
‘What are your plans?’ he wanted to know. ‘Is it true that you’ve gotten an offer from Yale?’
I said that it was. ‘Only, I still haven’t made up my mind.’
He stared at me as I put on my jacket. And then stretching to yawn, but not yawning, he asked me if I knew that he too had written to Yale. In his case, however, no one had bothered to acknowledge his letter with even a postcard. What did I think of that?
He gave me no chance to reply.
‘Damn!’ he said, and his chair rasped the floor as he pushed himself back. Suddenly it was to me that he was complaining. ‘It’s just not right, Richard. None of this is fair. You’ve done some good work, but so have I. I’ll bet our records are just about even. But when we go looking for jobs this year, it’s a very different story. You’re the one who gets all the breaks.’
To evade his criticism, I wanted to side with him. I was about to admit the injustice of affirmative action. But he continued, his voice hard with accusation. ‘Oh, it’s all very simple this year. You’re a Chicano. And I am a Jew. That’s really the only difference between us.’
His words stung anger alive. In a voice deceptively calm, I replied that he oversimplified the whole issue. Phrases came quickly: the importance of cultural diversity; new blood; the goal of racial integration. They were all the old arguments I had proposed years before—long since abandoned. After a minute or two, as I heard myself talking, I felt self-disgust. The job offers I was receiving were indeed unjustified. I knew that. All I was saying amounted to a frantic self-defense. It all was a lie. I tried to find an end to my sentence; my voice faltered to a stop.
‘Yeah, yeah, sure,’ he said. ‘I’ve heard all that stuff before. Nothing you say, though, really changes the fact that affirmative action is unfair. You can see that, can’t you? There isn’t any way for me to compete with you. Once there were quotas to keep my parents out of schools like Yale. Now there are quotas to get you in. And the effect on me is the same as it was for them. . . .’
At the edge of hearing, I listened to every word he spoke. But behind my eyes my mind reared—spooked and turning—then broke toward a reckless idea: Leave the university. Leave. Immediately the idea sprang again in my bowels and began to climb. Rent money. I pictured myself having to borrow. Get a job as a waiter somewhere? I had come to depend on the intellectual companionship of students—bright students—to relieve the scholar’s loneliness. I remembered the British Museum, a year in the silence. I wanted to teach; I wanted to read; I wanted this life. But I had to protest. How? Disqualify myself from the profession as long as affirmative action continued? Romantic exile? But I had to. Yes. I found the horizon again. It was calm.
The graduate student across the room had stopped talking; he was staring out the window. I said nothing. My decision was final. No, I would say to them all. Finally, simply, no.
I wrote a note to all the chairmen of English departments who had offered me jobs. I left a note for the professor in my own department at Berkeley who was in charge of helping graduate students look for teaching positions. (The contradictions of affirmative action have finally caught up with me. Please remove my name from the list of teaching job applicants.)
I telephoned my mother and father. My mother did not seem to hear exactly what I was trying to tell her. She let the subject pass without comment. (Was I still planning on coming for dinner this Sunday?) My father, however, clearly understood. Silent for a moment, he seemed uncertain of what I expected to hear. Finally, troubled, he said hesitantly, ‘I don’t know why you feel this way. We have never had any of the chances before.’
We, he said. But he was wrong. It was he who had never had any chance before.
CHAPTER SIX
MR. SECRETS
I am writing about those very things my mother has asked me not to reveal. Shortly after I published my first autobiographical essay seven years ago, my mother wrote me a letter pleading with me never again to write about our family life. ‘Write about something else in the future. Our family life is private.’ And besides: ‘Why do you need to tell the gringos about how “divided” you feel from the family?’
I sit at my desk now, surrounded by versions of paragraphs and pages of this book, considering that question.
When I decided to compose this intellectual autobiography, a New York editor told me that I would embark on a lonely journey. Over the noise of voices and dishes in an East Side restaurant, he said, ‘There will be times when you will think the entire world has forgotten you. Some mornings you will yearn for a phone call or a letter to assure you that you still are connected to the world.’ There have been mornings when I’ve dreaded the isolation this writing requires. Mornings spent listless in silence and in fear of confronting the blank sheet of paper. There have been times I’ve rushed away from my papers to answer the phone; gladly gotten up from my chair, hearing the mailman outside. Times I have been frustrated by the slowness of words, the way even a single paragraph never seemed done.
I had known a writer’s loneliness before, working on my dissertation in the British Museum. But that experience did not prepare me for the task of writing these pages where my own life is the subject. Many days I feared I had stopped living by committing myself to remember the past. I feared that my absorption with events in my past amounted to an immature refusal to live in the present. Adulthood seemed consumed by memory. I would tell myself otherwise. I would tell myself that the act of remembering is an act of the present. (In writing this autobiography, I am actually describing the man I have become—the man in the present.)
Times when the money ran out, I left writing for temporary jobs. Once I had a job for over six months. I resumed something like a conventional social life. But then I have turned away, come back to my San Francisco apartment to closet myself in the silence I both need and fear.
I stay away from late-night parties. (To be clearheaded in the morning.) I disconnect my phone for much of the day. I must avoid complex relationships—a troublesome lover or a troubled friend. The person who knows me best scolds me for escaping from life. (Am I evading adulthood?) People I know get promotions at jobs. Friends move away. Friends get married. Friends divorce. One friend tells me she is pregnant. Then she has a baby. Then the baby has the formed face of a child. Can walk. Talk. And still I sit at this desk laying my words like jigsaw pieces, a fellow with ladies in housecoats and old men in slippers who watch TV. Neighbors in my apartment house rush off to work about nine. I hear their steps on the stairs. (They will be back at six o’clock.) Somewhere planes are flying. The door slams behind them.
‘Why?’ My mother’s question hangs in the still air of memory.
The loneliness I have felt many mornings, however, has not made me forget that I am engaged in a highly public activity. I sit here in silence writing this small volume of words, and it seems to me the most public thing I ever have done. My mother’s letter has served to remind me: I am making my personal life public. Probably I will never try to explain my motives to my mother and father. My mother’s question will go unanswered to her face. Like everything else on these pages, my reasons for writing will be revealed instead to public readers I expect never to meet.
I
It is to those whom my mother refers to as the gringos that I write. The gringos. The expression reminds me that she and my father have not followed their children all the way down the path to full Americanization. They were changed—became more easy in public, less withdrawn and uncertain—by the public success of their children. But something remained unchanged in their lives. With excessive care they continue today to note the difference between private and public life. And their private society remains only their family. No matter how friendly they are in public, no matter how firm their smiles, my parents never forget when they are in public. My mother must use a high-pitched tone of voice when she addresses people who are not relatives. It is a tone of voice I have all my life heard her use away from the house. Coming home from grammar school with new friends, I would hear it, its reminder: My new intimates were strangers to her. Like my sisters and brother, over the years, I’ve grown used to hearing that voice. Expected to hear it. Though I suspect that voice has played deep in my soul, sounding a lyre, to recall my ‘betrayal,’ my movement away from our family’s intimate past. It is the voice I hear even now when my mother addresses her son- or daughter-in-law. (They remain public people to her.) She speaks to them, sounding the way she does when talking over the fence to a neighbor.
It was, in fact, the lady next door to my parents—a librarian—who first mentioned seeing my essay seven years ago. My mother was embarrassed because she hadn’t any idea what the lady was talking about. But she had heard enough to go to a library with my father to find the article. They read what I wrote. And then she wrote her letter.
It is addressed to me in Spanish, but the body of the letter is in English. Almost mechanically she speaks of her pride at the start. (‘Your dad and I are very proud of the brilliant manner you have to express yourself.’) Then the matter of most concern comes to the fore. ‘Your dad and I have only one objection to what you write. You say too much about the family . . . Why do you have to do that? . . . Why do you need to tell the gringos? . . . Why do you think we’re so separated as a family? Do you really think this, Richard?’
A new paragraph changes the tone. Soft, maternal. Worried for me she adds, ‘Do not punish yourself for having to give up our culture in order to “make it” as you say. Think of all the wonderful achievements you have obtained. You should be proud. Learn Spanish better. Practice it with your dad and me. Don’t worry so much. Don’t get the idea that I am mad at you either.
‘Just keep one thing in mind. Writing is one thing, the family is another. I don’t want tus hermanos hurt by your writings. And what do you think the cousins will say when they read where you talk about how the aunts were maids? Especially I don’t want the gringos knowing about our private affairs. Why should they? Please give this some thought. Please write about something else in the future. Do me this favor.’
Please.
To the adult I am today, my mother needs to say what she would never have needed to say to her child: the boy who faithfully kept family secrets. When my fourth-grade teacher made our class write a paper about a typical evening at home, it never occurred to me actually to do so. ‘Describe what you do with your family,’ she told us. And automatically I produced a fictionalized account. I wrote that I had six brothers and sisters; I described watching my mother get dressed up in a red-sequined dress before she went with my father to a party; I even related how the imaginary baby-sitter (‘a high school student’) taught my brother and sisters and me to make popcorn and how, later, I fell asleep before my parents returned. The nun who read what I wrote would have known that what I had written was completely imagined. But she never said anything about my contrivance. And I never expected her to either. I never thought she really wanted me to write about my family life. In any case, I would have been unable to do so.
I was very much the son of parents who regarded the most innocuous piece of information about the family to be secret. Although I had, by that time, grown easy in public, I felt that my family life was strictly private, not to be revealed to unfamiliar ears or eyes. Around the age of ten, I was held by surprise listening to my best friend tell me one day that he ‘hated’ his father. In a furious whisper he said that when he attempted to kiss his father before going to bed, his father had laughed: ‘Don’t you think you’re getting too old for that sort of thing, son?’ I was intrigued not so much by the incident as by the fact that the boy would relate it to me.
In those years I was exposed to the sliding-glass-door informality of middle-class California family life. Ringing the doorbell of a friend’s house, I would hear someone inside yell out, ‘Come on in, Richie; door’s not locked.’ And in I would go to discover my friend’s family undisturbed by my presence. The father was in the kitchen in his underwear. The mother was in her bathrobe. Voices gathered in familiarity. A parent scolded a child in front of me; voices quarreled, then laughed; the mother told me something about her son after he had stepped out of the room and she was sure he couldn’t overhear; the father would speak to his children and to me in the same tone of voice. I was one of the family, the parents of several good friends would assure me. (Richie.)
