Lorde wonders why the most far-out position always seems right to her-why extremes are more comfortable than the “unruffled middle” (15). But this “home” was there, a sweet place that Lorde kept as “my truly private paradise” (14). Their home was in Carricou, but Lorde could never find it on a map and doubted her mother’s geography as fantastical or crazy.
There lived Aunt Anni, Linda’s great-aunt, sister to Ma-Liz.
Someday they would all walk the streets of Grenville, Grenada. Lorde knew “home” was a faraway place and where they were at now was only a temporary abode. She would tell the girls stories of Grenada, of her home. Linda loved being close to the water, and Lorde and her sisters saw how pensive she would get when they would go down to its edge. Byron did not like to talk about home, and wanted to make his home here. Linda missed the singing that was everywhere in Grenada America was “cold and raucous” (11). She knew what people were thinking, knew about food, and knew the Museum of Natural History was where you took kids so they would be smart. They knew little about this strange country, but Linda knew about Paradise Plums candy, mixing oils and tinctures, praying to the Virgin Mary, and making virtues out of necessities. They had three children, Phyllis, Helen, and Audrey. They got jobs at the Waldorf Astoria, but when the hotel closed her mother worked as a scullery maid at a tea shop until the owner fired her because she was Black. Her mother, Linda, and father, Byron, came here in their early twenties, having been married a year. Once she visited she saw her mother’s powers walking through those streets. Lorde begins her chronological narrative with a brief reflection on Grenada, where her parents were from. She is “woman forever” and her body is “a living representation of other life older longer wiser” (7). She has felt the triad of mother and father and child, and the triad of grandmother mother and daughter.
Lorde says she always wished she could be man and woman, holding the strongest parts of both her mother and father within herself. This is how she came out whole this is how she became herself and Afrekete. Then there was the first woman she loved and left, and the “battalion of arms where I often retreated for shelter and sometimes found it” (5). There was the white woman who ran up to her car once, screaming for help until she saw Lorde was Black. There was Louise Briscoe, who died in her mother’s rooming house. There were many of these women, like DeLois, the woman in Harlem who was “big and Black and special” (5) and loved herself. Lorde, who writes this work in the first-person perspective and mostly in the past tense, begins by saying that while her father left his mark on her, it was the women in her life who led her home.
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