Curiosity in my regard, and there was a lot of it, didn’t only come from inside Mason Gross, for generally the kids were cool with whatever. Curiosity came from people of my generation in my soon-to-be former existence. They regarded my new life, my adventure, in the words of some, my “journey,” with envy and hesitation. They identified with my break for freedom but feared their academic or lawyerly selves had already quashed their inner Beyoncé, that the wet blanket of professionalism had smothered their flame. They wondered if they, too, could leave dutiful, controlled professional personas and fling themselves into a new, hypersaturated, Technicolor—no, RGB color-coded—artistic life of creativity and apparent abandon. I had yearned like that before actually walking away. Professing admiration for my bravery, my friends asked how I did it and hoped I would send back a report.
Why do something different? Why start something new? Why did I do it? What made me think I could begin anew in an entirely different field from history, where, truth be told, I had made a pretty good reputation? Was it hard leaving a chaired professorship at Princeton? I didn’t think so. No, I thought not. For a long time, my answers, even to myself, were simple—too simple by far.
I said, because I wanted to.
Because I could.
I knew from my mother I could do it.
My smart, small, intense, beautiful, disciplined little mother, Dona Irvin, administrator to author, held the key to my confidence. To a very great extent, she still does. The so much more of myself beyond my sex, race, and age that I cherish is rooted in my family, in my father the gregarious bohemian, who had taught me to draw decades ago, but even more in my mother, who, starting over at sixty-five, blossomed as an older woman, transforming herself into a creator in her own right after a lifetime as a shyly dutiful wife and mother. As an older woman she cast off the strictures of a lifetime—well, some of them—and took to wearing red or white with her dark skin and taking the bus overnight to play slot machines in Reno.
My mother had never written a book before sixty-five. She had started her career as a school administrator late, after the civil rights movement opened opportunities for an educated black woman, and she had grown professionally. She overcame crippling shyness whose stutter made the telephone her monster. At a liberating feminist retreat at Asilomar, near Monterey, she reclaimed her own name, Dona, after decades of letting other people correct her. Yes, people tried to correct her pronunciation of her own name, “DOH-na,” and talk her into accepting the more easily recognizable Donna, “DAHN-na.” At the Asilomar retreat, she put a stop to that and made people call her by her own name. And she started writing in earnest.
ALWAYS A TERRIFIC writer of letters and reports, she’d never attempted a book. After Asilomar, she found strength within to pull it off.
She devoted ten years to researching and publishing her first book, The Unsung Heart of Black America, about the middle-class black people she knew as close, long-term friends in the United Methodist Church we attended in the 1950s and early 1960s in Oakland, a work the fine and generous historian John Hope Franklin blurbed.
It took me years to sense the bravery, the sturdy determination her metamorphosis demanded, for she was tougher than I could see during her lifetime. I knew she delved deep to express herself with unadorned honesty. Hard for a woman. Doubly hard for a black woman. Triply hard for a black woman of a class and a generation never wanting to let them (meaning, mainly, white people) catch even a sidelong glimmer of remorse.
Suppressing doubt and never washing dirty linen in public came naturally to my mother. A public that was black and wore the beloved faces of her friends awaited my mother’s writing as an upstanding black person. That public’s expectation of her as a black author discouraged her speaking as an individual whose identity exceeded race. She felt that pressure and wrote her first book as a black woman, never losing sight of race in America. Yet there was more to her.
It took her ten more years to write and publish her frank and funny memoir, I Hope I Look That Good When I’m That Old. Just pause for a moment and imagine the guts and good humor needed to use that title, to admit to looking good, and to write the word “old” and apply it to herself.
I Hope I Look That Good When I’m That Old.
People used to say that to her all the time, and now they’re saying it to me.
I Hope I Look That Good When I’m That Old, 2002,
Dona Irvin photo by Ron Carter, 9" × 6"
In her memoir she went on to claim herself as a unique individual, racialized, gendered, but with much more to her than race and gender. She wrote as a daughter of two parents in conflict on the most intimate level. The conflict stayed within the range of ordinary human misbehavior—the usual adultery and betrayal—but talking about that exceeded the vocabulary of race alone. Hard to do in the USA, because it’s hard to describe black humanity beyond race and so easy, practically an automatic response, to interpret a claim of individuality as treason to blackness. It’s as though individuality, the pride of white Americans, virtually what it means to be white but not a Nazi or Klansman, belongs only to them; as though a black woman speaking as an individual, not speaking as the race, must be backing away from blackness. My mother had to find words to claim both uniqueness and blackness. But find those words she did. Dona was working on a website about vigorous old people of many races when she died at ninety-one, not at all ready to leave.
Looking at her, identifying with her when I was sixty, I figured, hell, I could do that. I could do something new in the quarter century or more still before me, even starting from close to scratch. My mother’s example made me think I could lay down one life and pick up a new one.
I HAD BEEN a youthful artist, and for years I carried a sketchbook and drew all the time. I drew (but have lost that sketchbook) in Bordeaux, France, on a junior year abroad. I was still drawing when I lived in Ghana with my parents in the 1960s in my early twenties. The three drawings on the following page, pencil on paper, were in my sketchbooks there.
Ghana gave my Bay Area eyes, squinting into a bright blue sky, a whole new palette, a landscape and architecture and people in clothes and rioted textures and colors. Something grew on every surface: bushes, flowers, or mold, or all of it all at once. The California Bay Area that I had left was a beautiful but eucalyptus-gray place, foggy in the morning, dryly sunny in the day, with mostly light-colored people.
In Ghana I moved through a humid world of tropical contrasts and color-wheel hues. The dirt was Venetian red, the trees and grass Hooker’s green. White buildings, red tiled roofs. Cadmium red bougainvillea climbing whitewashed buildings and cascading over fences and walls, some topped with menacing shards of broken brown glass or black wrought-iron spikes testifying to class tensions barricading the wealthy against the grasping poor. Together, this colorful landscape and the very black people in white and spectacular clothing altered my vision of everyday life.