77 pages • 2 hours read
Zami: A New Spelling of My Name
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Chapters 11-14Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 11 Summary
Whenever Audre or her mother cooks, they grind spices in her mother’s special mortar that she brought from her West Indian homeland. It is of a foreign wood and carved with fruit and is among one of Audre’s most favorite things that her mother owns. The inside of the mortar and the bottom of the pestle are worn into “a layer of velvet” (72). Audre loves pounding herbs, and as a result, her favorite dish is souse: meat marinated in a blend of pounded spices. Audre rarely gets to choose a meal, but when she does, it is always souse: “That way, I knew I would get to use my mother’s mortar, and this in itself was more treat for me than any of the forbidden foods” (73). Audre would always carefully collect, peel or slice, and grind all of the herbs in a kind of ritual. Her mother would usually reprimand her for taking too long, and Audre would scuttle off to get the meat: “The last day I ever pounded seasoning for souse was in the summer of my fifteenth year” (74).
Audre spends the summer in doctor’s offices, instead of with her friends, as her mother is worried because she hasn’t yet begun menstruating, although she never speaks explicitly about this subject with Audre. Audre knows all about it, however, because four years prior a large boy had “threatened to break my glasses if I didn’t let him stick his ‘thing’ between my legs” (75). Terrified she would become pregnant, she forged a note to the librarian, so she could look at science books to determine the correlation “between penises and getting pregnant” (75), although she didn’t understand that she had to get her period to have a baby. She was still afraid that she might be pregnant years later, and that she would get in a heap of trouble for everything. Audre also bribed her classmates to help educate her on sex, despite being convinced that her parents had never done anything of the sort.
When she is fifteen, she gets her period but doesn’t know how to tell her mother, so she communicates her period’s arrival by purposefully staining the toilet seat. Relieved, Audre endures coded sex-talk from her mother warning her about the impropriety of male attention, even though Audre has no male friends. Linda affectionately nags at Audre, and Audre asks to make souse. Her mother goes to the store while Audre begins grinding the spices.
Audre revels in the newfound sensuality of her womanly body and for years has fantasies of her mother caressing her sensuously. She gets caught up in the thrusting and grinding of spices:
As I continued to pound the spice, a vital connection seemed to establish itself between the muscles of my fingers curved tightly around the smooth pestle in its insistent downward motion, and the molten core of my body whose sources emanated from a new ripe fullness just beneath the pit of my stomach. That invisible thread, taut and sensitive as a clitoris exposed, stretched through my curled fingers (78).
When her mother gets home, Linda reprimands Audre for taking too long to grind the spices, grabs the mortar, and begins violently grinding. Audre says the spices are getting crushed, and Linda asks if Audre is alright. Audre starts crying because of the violence with which her mother is handling the spices, and Linda tells her to go lie down, putting her arm around her to lead Audre to the couch. Audre is surprised to find she is almost as tall as her mother.
Chapter 12 Summary
Everyone warned Audre about strangers—white people, non-Catholics, men, and squares—“but in high school my real sisters were strangers; my teachers were racists; and my friends were that color I was never supposed to trust” (81). Audre beings a rebellious sisterhood with a group called The Branded, all of whom are white, save for Audre. Growing up, Audre remembers thinking of racial difference as threatening: she once thought her sister was a witch because her pink nipples were lighter than Audre’s purple ones. Audre didn’t understand why her friends visited each other, but she never went to their houses, believing her own personality—and not her blackness—was the root of her difference between herself and others.
Audre feels Hunter High School saved her because she found people who did not actively punish her for being different. She also becomes the literary editor of the art magazine, finding solace in poetry. She wages verbal war against her parents, using the pretext of studying to gain some modicum of privacy. She gets nosebleeds at night and repeats Millay’s “Renascence” to herself, “the sadness and the pain and the renewal […] gave me hope” (84). Audre confides in her problems with her parents to a counselor, who repeats back all of Audre’s accusations to Linda. Linda starts crying and gets angry at Audre, asking how she could say those terrible things about Linda to a white woman. Audre realizes the counselor is racist when she later tells her to become a dental technician after she scores high on manual dexterity and science exams. Audre is convinced that her parents do not love her, and so seeks to annoy them as much as possible.
Chapter 13 Summary
During Audre’s freshman year, several black girls enroll at her school, but she only befriends one: Gennie. This begins Audre’s trifurcated relationships with The Branded, Gennie, and Maxine, “my shy piano-playing Jewish friend […] who later had a nervous breakdown because she was afraid she was dying of leprosy” (85-86). Audre keeps each of her friend groups separate because they do not like each other: “I shared classes and lunchtime with The Branded, some lunches and after-school time with Maxine, and study periods, and every other chance I could get, with Gennie. She was the only one I saw on weekends” (86).
Audre and Gennie smoke, play hooky, steal from their parents. They flirt with boys, and feel they can take on the world,spending hours dressing in costumes to look the part. They view New York as their backyard and sing songs loudly wherever they go. During the summer, they hang out exclusively on weekdays, and so Audre finds the weekends very dull. Audre’s mother reprimands her for not doing her chores, wondering what she has been doing all day. Audre and Gennie buy icies, “which both of our mothers had forbidden [and] were suspected by many Black mother of spreading polio through Harlem” (90). Sometimes the girls break curfew; Audre would receive a beating while Gennie would be grounded by her single mother.
Gennie meets her father, who is charming and cruel, spending more of her time with him, which Louisa, Gennie’s mother, argues against. Gennie wants to move in with her father, and Louisa refuses, so Gennie starts talking about killing herself. Audre tries to ask Gennie about the people who care about Gennie, and Gennie responds that they’ll have to take care of themselves. Gennie picks a day to slit her wrists, and Audre prays to God she lives. Her grandmother finds her, and Louisa lets Gennie go live with her father. Gennie, although annoyed she has failed at suicide, is pleased with the result. Audre starts going to church again.
Audre and Gennie see each other less and less, and Audre senses Gennie is not happy living with her father. Audre is uneasy whenever she goes over there, and Audre’s parents do not like Gennie. Audre spends more time with Maxine, hanging out away from their mothers and talking about their crushes on female faculty. Audre becomes the official locker room bug killer even though she is afraid of them.
In January, Audre and Gennie get into a fight and don’t speak for two weeks, until Audre’s birthday. They go to the zoo and lay on Gennie’s sofa/bed, smoking cigarettes and toasting marshmallows. In March, Gennie comes over at night after Linda begrudgingly allows her to. Gennie looks terrible, and her face is scratched. She asks to stay at Audre’s house, confessing she got into a fight with her father and has nowhere to sleep. Audre knows her parents will not allow it, and fearing Linda’s wrath, Audre suggests that Gennie calls her mother. Gennie says she can’t, but she’ll figure out something. She lies to Linda and leaves. Linda asks Audre what is wrongbut does not question Audre’s false justification that Gennie needed math notes. Linda fusses at Audre over her clothing and then tells her not to get involved with Gennie. Audre defends Gennie and worries about her.
Chapter 14 Summary
Audre writes about all the things she never did with Gennie. Louisa calls to tell Audre that they found Gennie on the community center steps. She had ingested rat poison and will probably die as a result. Audre prays that Gennie will survive, believing that Gennie will “come sauntering in with a new outfit she got someone to buy her and that quick toss of her head, saying, ‘I was fine all the time’” (98). Audre visits Gennie in the emergency room, where Gennie’s mom tells her she won’t last until tonight. Lorde recalls that“[her] head [was] an endless kaleidoscope of numb images, jumbled, repeated” (98). Audre remembers speech class, the only class she’d taken with Gennie.
When Audre goes home, she lies to her mom and says Gennie was poisoned by mistake. Audre goes back to the hospital the next morning, remembering that they had bought the gelatin capsules on Friday that Gennie had used to swallow the poison. Audre realizes that Gennie’s hair is partially fake. Audre asks Gennie why, and Gennie says she knows but Audre does not. Gennie dies on Monday.
Linda asks Audre why she didn’t tell her that Gennie committed suicide. She also asks if Gennie told Audre why. Audre says no, and Linda tries to console her by saying that it was bound to happen because of Gennie’s no-good father. Her parents tell her not to lie to them again. Audre gives Louisa Gennie’s notebooks but keeps Gennie’s diary for herself. Louisa says Audre was Gennie’s best friend. Audre becomes uncomfortable and mumbles an excuse to leave. Louisa asks Audre why Gennie committed suicide, but Audre claims she doesn’t know. Audre leaves. They bury Gennie. A news article says that since Gennie was not pregnant, there was no reason for her suicide. As the car drives away from the grave, Audre watches a man coverthe casket with dirt.
Chapters 11-14 Analysis
These chapters represent Audre’s physical coming-of-age, especially with the insistence upon the mortar and its associations with womanly smells. The sexual awakening in these chapters is accompanied by an association with the home and an increasing emphasis upon sensuality and femininity. Regarding the incident with the mortar and pestle, there is a penetrative sexuality to this experience as a result of Audre’s rhythmic thrusting. Audre merges her burgeoning sexuality with a kind of semi-religious experience that is oriented around food. In this way, religion or the divine is conflated with female sexuality and the domestic sphere via food and cooking, indicating a kind of magic that the narrator repeatedly references as being tied to femininity.
In sharp contrast to the positivity of Audre’s sexual awakening is the presence of rape. Before Audre even gets her period, she is raped by an older neighborhood boy who threatens to break her glasses if she does not have sex with him. This repeats the violence that Audre associates with male sexual contact. Much like the comic store man’s molestation of her, Audre blames herself for both attacks, saying she never should have been alone with either of them in the first place. This instance of self-blame is fairly normal for victims of sexual assault. It also sets the stage for Gennie’s suicide later in this set of chapters, as there are indications that Gennie is being physically if not sexually abused by her father. However, even though Audre is Gennie’s best friend, they never relate the extent of their abuse to one another, indicated by Gennie’s keeping up of appearances in terms of her fake hair. It is only after Gennie has poisoned herself that Audre realizes the secrets they have kept from one another, although she still never speaks them aloud. The pain of secrecy binds Gennie and Audre together, although eventually it is too much for Gennie to handle and she takes her own life.
As Audre becomes more secretive and less isolated, her relationship with her mother becomes more tenuous. These chapters demonstrate the dynamism of that relationship, going from the ultimate high point of Audre’s discovery of her womanhood to a broken relationship when her mother denigrates Gennie. Gennie seems to be the catalyst for the severing of Audre’s relationship with her mother; whereas Gennie shows Audre freedom and friendship, her mother still only offers rules and isolation. As a result, Audre’s relationship with her mother fractures, and subsequent chapters demonstrate a shift in character. Whereas Linda was a focal point in the chapters before Gennie, Linda fades into the background of the book’s remaining chapters, arising as a kind of memory. As the book’s narrative shifts to focus upon Audre’s romantic relationships with other women, Audre leaves her mother behind, trapped in her own nostalgia.
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