Writing About Lives

I have yet to meet an Emily I didn’t like.

First of all, I love the poetry of Emily Dickinson whom I discovered when I was in high school.

Then there was a curly headed girl named Emily I met at the Missouri Botanical Garden between the summer of my junior and senior years at Southwest High School in St. Louis in 1983. We participated in an outdoor leadership program called ECO-ACT. She attended the prosperous Clayton High School and was the single most liberated, free thinking teenager I had ever met.

There was Emily a student I taught at DePauw University in Greencastle, Indiana. She grew up in Amish country, which I didn’t know Indiana even had at the time. This Emily wrote a fearless story for the student newspaper about students getting drunk on a back country road in Putnam County. People were furious at her. She didn’t flinch. And when she made the leap to broadcast journalism, interning at NBC’s Today Show, she let me stay at her posh apartment for three weeks long after she had vacated. It was my first time living on the Upper West Side and my longest stint in the city. That period helped me become a denizen of uptown Manhattan and subsequently the Columbia University area.

And last summer I got to hang out with Emily, the daughter of a colleague from The Salt Lake Tribune. From the time that Emily was in junior high school in Layton, Utah all the way through her marriage to a guy who is destined for greatness in corporate America, she has called me “Uncle Samuel.” No one had ever called me that. It’s not likely that my sister will ever have children.

Now I want to introduce to you my newest; Emily Raboteau is the author of “The Professor’s Daughter,” and an assistant professor of English at City College of New York. The novel, loosely based on her life, is about a biracial young woman who happens to be the daughter of a Princeton professor. I’m a member of something called Our Word, a group which supports writers of color in Columbia’s MFA program. Our Word also allows us to meet one-on-one with published writers. It’s one of the rare times we get writers of color to give us a close reading and comment on our work. A few days ago I was scheduled to meet Emily at Max’s Cafe on Amersterdam, a popular hang out for Columbia students.

Because I had only seen her picture in the book, when I got there at about 11:40 a.m., I wasn’t sure she was there. I looked all around. I noticed a very petite white woman sitting outside on the patio. I surely didn’t want to approach some random white woman with some story about meeting a writer. Who would believe that? The woman on the patio looked like she could pass for a grad student.

Frantic that my hour was diminishing, I went outside and called Rowena, the Our Word coordinator, to make sure I was at the right restaraunt. As I stood outside, I looked over again and saw this tiny woman sitting in the corner. She reminded me of my mother’s neighbors in St. Louis. They are from New Orleans and for the longest time I thought they were white. If you’d just seen their skin under a light and didn’t have the chance to see their faces, you would have thought so, too.

“I know she’s there,” Rowena assured me on the phone.

The woman whom I had been eyeballing had strolled down the street. Couldn’t have been her. Five minutes later, she shows up at my table and asked me if I am Samuel.

We laughed and talked about not being sure who was whom. For the next 45 minutes she critiqued two of my short stories “Fassie’s Tale,” and “The Lancome Lad,” and had the most affirming things to say them both. Affirming things is an understatement. She was highly complimentary about my work, in a way I rarely experienced within the MFA program. As a nonfiction writer, writing fiction feels a little like walking on a high wire without a net. If I fall the splat will be grand. She was the second visiting writer to really enjoy these pieces because they are about boundaries, sexuality, race and religion. We talked about everything from James Baldwin to hypocrites in churches. The time zipped by. She told me to attend the Callaloo Writing Workshop in Texas, a place where writers of color get a lot of nurturing from published writers and that I should submit my work to their literary journal. I will indeed.

A few days later during a question and answer session that I led with Emily in front of a group of MFA students, she said that for every published piece she had in literary journals, she had hundreds and hundreds of pieces rejected. Hundreds. Ignore the rules about not submitting things simultaneously to literary journals or else it would “take years from your life,” she told us. She was brutal about how disgruntled she was with the first few book covers and the way the marketing division at Picador targeted blacks for her book. In the end, black women were her biggest readers, something which surprised her.

I thought she was a fearless funny woman because of her wonderous, bold prose and the relentlessness in the voice. But I knew she was a real spitfire when she opened her question and answer session with a comment about lesbian haircuts and nipples. (An insider Our Word joke that would take up too much space to rehash.)

I have yet to meet an Emily I didn’t like.