by Nora Paley
Who Grace Paley was and that she was my mother are naturally inseparable for me. That is the luck I carry, now that it is “afterward.”
As her child I absorbed the global way my mother took in the day. She experienced time as a bathtub calibrated by stories however they were sensed. As a young kid I recognized her open water intelligence but there was always a shark swimming through it. I witnessed how hard she worked to get it right on the page as well as how much of her work was out in that day, not at her kitchen table typewriter. I learned from her that precision requires a warm eye, not a cold one. This involved a lot of city walking. In the second half of her life, it involved country walking in Vermont.
I can give you a daughter’s snapshot of my mother’s life in the 1950s early 1960s. In my memory, my brother, mother, and I were walking the cracked pavement and cobblestone streets of our neighborhood every day, on the way to the park (Washington Square), the grocery store where we had seemingly endless credit (Jefferson Market), or the beautiful dark old library (Jackson Square branch). We walked through our streets always to public spaces, always meeting friends, my child self tugging on her long full 1950s cotton skirt to keep going, stop talking! The women we ran into were mothers who were artists, anti-atomic-bomb-testing activists, often also in the PTA, mothers working to keep the buses out of Washington Square Park, many single parents (or all of these). They are varied, radiant, smart, grown women in my memory. The men we ran into seemed clever, fanciful, sometimes lovable, but brittle, as a species. I noticed as a little girl how these expansive women narrowed down to “handle” the men in family life as well as at political meetings. They accepted this task and seemed to love them anyway.
I had a difficult depressed funny father of my own who required quite a bit of “handling.” Eventually, late in my teens, my mother left him and remarried a very different difficult, complicated, though not depressed husband. Both men supported her writing totally. This was a time when women’s lives were not considered interesting enough to be the subject of stories.
The segmentalization of life, now talked about in terms of balancing, was something my mother was incapable of, so luckily did not believe in it. In the ’60s there were people who knew her as a political activist and did not know she was a writer, and vice versa. She was criticized for spending so much time in antiwar (American War in Vietnam) activities versus at her “desk.”
In order to get courage she’d say to herself, before going onstage in front of large audiences for literary or political events, “The worst they can do is kill me!” Then she’d laugh.
Her way of living in a time of increasing compartmentalization and disintegration had confluence with the women’s movement. She often said that when people say nothing happened in the 1970s, it is because so much was going on with women. The phrase “The Personal is political,” which came out of the late ’60s early ’70s, described to me the culture of my family and community in the very pre-affluent Greenwich Village. I assumed it originated in Jewish scripture (we were atheists).
My mother’s powerful optimism annoyed me as a grouchy teenager. Later, I understood it. In her last illness she wanted to keep that thin silver thread of her life going as long as she could—like she always did in her gardens after the frost with the slim green stem hiding under the frozen ended summer. Her dying was not like her, but she knew everyone else did it.
My mother’s voice is strong in my ears, but I am the daughter. It is also strong on the page and that is lucky for all of us. I am grateful that the wonderful poet and painter Kevin Bowen was inspired to put this book together.