Real Life

Copyright

Fourth Estate

An Imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF

Published by Flamingo 1995

First published in Great Britain by Chatto and Windus 1986

Copyright © Marsha Hunt 1986

The Author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

Source ISBN: 9780006548737

Ebook Edition © FEBRUARY 2016 ISBN: 9780007483105

Version: 2016-01-19

For Karis

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

INTRODUCTION

1 MADE IN AMERICA

2 CULTURED PEARLS

3 THE FRONT LINE

4 INFANT DIPLOMACY

5 MOUNT AIRY AND CHESTNUT HILL

6 THE DREAM MACHINE

7 EVERYTHING’S NOT EVERYTHING

8 FREE AT LAST

9 PURI NATURABILIS

10 PRIORITIES

11 SAVE THE TEARS

12 THE PLEASURE ZONE

13 SMOKED OUT

14 WORDS WITHOUT MUSIC

15 CHANGING FACES

16 BEYOND THE BRIDGE

EPILOGUE

Keep Reading

Indent

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Also by the Author

About the Publisher

INTRODUCTION

Co Wicklow

Ireland

Wednesday, November 15, 1995

My dear Karis,

It’s 4 am. Can’t sleep. I’m in the middle of writing the new introduction to my autobiography and I keep thinking about things that were happening when I wrote it. Ten years have slipped by and a lot has changed. For one thing, you’re 25 and living in San Francisco whereas I’ve just moved to Ireland to be with Alan after completing my fourth book.

Although I’m pleased that Real Life is being republished, I dread the prospect of it giving journalists an excuse to ask about Mick. They hate to believe that we’ve been on friendly terms for years and that you have a good relationship with him, but nonetheless, I’m glad that through Real Life I had a chance to explain what had happened between us, because the details of the good times and the trials seem less real and less relevant with each passing year. It’s odd to think that you are already older than I was when your father and I were lovers and even older than I was when I gave birth to you at 24.

In 1985 when people heard that I’d been commissioned to write my autobiography, some said I was too young at 39. But by then I’d already had three careers, been a single parent and lived on three continents. Not to mention having survived the legal battles with Mick and the humiliating experience of dealing with his lawyers and the press. Writing this book changed my life. I had to recreate events and recall circumstances which were far more disturbing than I had admitted that they were when I’d actually experienced them. So by the time I’d completed my final draft, I was both stronger and weaker because of self-examination. I’ve had more than my share of luck and adventure and being identified as an icon of the 60s hasn’t stopped me from adventuring. But I’ve always believed that what made my life worth writing about was that as a woman and an African American my experiences reflected the changes in how we were perceived. Had I been born ten years earlier for instance, my years in rock bands could have never happened and rather than being hailed as a single parent I would have been tagged an ‘unwed mother’.

No doubt you laugh at my referring to myself as an African American because you know how I hate that label and resent the way that we Americans descended from slaves have had a name change far too often. Coloured. Negro. Black. And now African American which is not only a mouthful but relates us to a continent that for at least four generations our family has had no experience of. All I know of Africa is what I’ve read, been told or learned about through the media. But then who am I to complain when I had the audacity in Real Life to try to coin a label for us of my own. Melangian now seems an absurd word, but then who stuck us with African American and don’t we have a say in the matter?

Nonetheless when I was asked if I wanted to rewrite the autiobiography I declined, although I cringe when I see the word Melangian pop up. My pomposity is embarrassing but it should remain on the record. Real Life was my first attempt at writing a book and having written two novels and this most recent non-fiction, I could only make a mess of trying to adjust my first.

In 1985 I doubt that anybody would have believed that I would write another book. A review in Time Out said the one thing my readers would be certain of is that I would never write again and my editor for Real Life moaned, ‘How can you want to write when it takes you so long!’ She’d come to our flat on Marlborough Place and watched my slow pecking at a manual typewriter. I have to admit that there have been thousands of instances while I’ve been labouring over subsequent books when I’ve wondered if she didn’t have a point.

I didn’t become a weeper until I became a writer and it’s hard to tell whether it’s the craft which drives me to tears or the characters that I write about that I’m forced to live with daily. On the other hand the isolation I’ve imposed upon myself so that I could churn books out might make a lot of people emotional. Friends couldn’t understand why I moved to Folkestone in 1986 and then slipped off to a remote house in France in 1989. But I can hear myself telling them ‘I have to be alone to write.’ It also gave me the time and space to recreate myself as an author without anybody to challenge me with ‘But you’re a singer …’ or ‘But you’re an actress …’ or ‘You’re that girl from Hair who had Mick Jagger’s baby …’ Thank God I’ve never allowed other people’s perceptions of me to stop me from living my life, because I’d now probably be a bag lady toting tatty plastic carriers full of Hair press clippings circa 1969.

No doubt you think it’s crazy that I’ve now moved to the Irish countryside but this is no more bizarre than your buying a house in San Francisco, within a few miles of the very place I deserted when I tromped off for a European adventure nearly thirty years ago. But when I encouraged you to go to an American university so you could shed some of your public school ways, how could I foresee that you’d make the States your home? It seems these days that you see more of your father than you see of me. But I’m glad that you’re happy and surrounded by some of the friends you made at Yale.

By the way, thanks for Fed-Exing those set dressings to me in time for my performance of Joy last week. They arrived two hours before the play was starting and to see that little yellow party dress hanging on stage brought back endless memories of two summers ago when we got together in France to adapt my novel and prepare me to perform it at the Edinburgh Festival. God that was fun wasn’t it - like old times with just the two of us. I can still hear you asking me the first time I cried in rehearsal, ‘Mum, are you all right?’ So that I had to step out of my character to say, ‘I’m fine Miss Karis … just acting.’

I hope you’ll stage Joy in San Francisco, because there must be scores of older black actresses needing a good role, and if you can direct me, you can direct anybody.

I was sure last Monday that I’d forget my lines but somehow they came back to me. And at the end of my performance I was tempted to tell the audience, ‘My daughter produced and directed me in this play at last year’s Edinburgh Festival’ but I was scared it would reek of a mother’s pride. After 30 years in Britain you’d think some English modesty would have rubbed off on me, but it still feels unnatural … Speaking of which, next February 28th will mark the anniversary of my arrival in London from Berkeley. I’m not one for parties but maybe I should have one to coincide with the publication of Repossessing Ernestine which comes out two weeks earlier. Have you read the uncorrected proof yet? I think you should since you keep popping up in it. That picture Stefan sent me of you in France will be included amongst the photographs. Everybody says you look lovely.

It seems unbelievable that I finally finished writing Ernestine’s story. It’s taken four years in all from the beginning of my quest to find her, and it seems like a light year ago when I rang you at Yale to say, ‘Somebody claims that they’ve spotted my grandmother in Memphis’ and you told me I had to go see her and even beat me to it. Fifty-two years in a mental ward and still standing. What’s sad is that she’s not compos mentis enough to read her own story.

Anyway, Miss Karis, it’s now 6am and raining hard. I’m alone because Alan’s away working. The house is spectacularly quiet. So much so that I can hear the sound of the felt tip I’m writing with scratching on the page. A lot of people would hate this silence but I thrive on it after the years of being in France on my own … I have to keep reminding myself that I’m in Ireland, because unless I go into town, it seems I could be anywhere. The country’s like that somehow, especially when I’m indoors. But as soon as I hit Dublin I think, ‘Lord, woman, how have you ended up in Ireland!’ Of course Alan’s the answer and thank goodness he didn’t live somewhere weird. I love this house and there’s something in the air which says that I’m being afforded another new beginning.

I hope you don’t mind that this book has been republished. It’s not supposed to dredge up old wounds but merely stands as an account of the first thirty-nine years of my life. Thank you immensely for your part in it and trust that if I had to live it all again, I wouldn’t have missed you for the world.

I send endless hugs and love, Mama

1 MADE IN AMERICA

The atomic age dawned on 16 July 1945 at 5.30 am in the New Mexican desert with the success of a bomb with 20,000 times the power of TNT. I was probably conceived around that time, as it happens.

I guess you could say I got my start in an airplane factory called Brewster’s, where my mother, Inez, and her sister, Thelma, worked at the time, just a commuter’s distance from Philadelphia. Women were establishing themselves as an invaluable factor in the US workforce. Trained to read the blueprints, to rivet, to run the drill press or drill gun and build planes which were a main instrument of war, they would never again believe that their usefulness was restricted to home and child-rearing.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt had been dead one year and three days when I arrived, on 15 April 1946.

My genetic make-up was to prove a disability, because it automatically meant that the equality and freedom that were supposed to be endemic elements of the American culture were not going to be mine.

I am only referred to as American when I am out of the country. My skin colour is oak with a hint of maple. Of the various races I know I comprise – African, American Indian, German Jew and Irish – only the African was acknowledged, and I was labelled ‘coloured’. This was changed to ‘Negro’ in more sophisticated circles. The less evolved would often call me ‘nigger’. Over the years, I would encounter a slew of nicknames and variations on the theme of my complexion. Being colour-coded was a determining factor in who or what I could become.

Americans of slave descent are not purely African. Though we are a combination of races, this fact is avoided by all. The consequent dilemma is that entire aspects of our heritage, attitudes and behaviour are never attributed to our genetic make-up. This seems short-sighted on everyone’s part, especially as Americans are so big on understanding human nature.

I am not merely what you see. I’m the total sum of my parts, and the dominant elements aren’t necessarily the most visibly apparent ones. One morning in Paris, I realized that to come to terms with myself meant that I would have to come to terms with my ancestral past. It was 5 July 1985, the day after America’s celebration of her independence.

While growing up in Philadelphia, the first capital of the United States, had enhanced my sense of the nation’s history, I had never examined my own. As it was cautiously overlooked by everyone else, it had been easy for me to carry on as if it didn’t exist.

I enthusiastically set out to trace my family tree. I took out a library book on genealogy. Tracing my family turned out to be impossible, since slave births and deaths were not recorded and marriage was not allowed. It’s as if my great-grandparents just fell out of the sky.

While history is what is written about the past, I accept that it’s drawn from deduction, supposition and conjecture, as well as some lies and deceptions motivated by politics, money and sex. No matter. It’s good reading and great soap opera, so I’m sorry that there is no history of my ancestors to share with you.

My geographical and cultural heritage is largely American, and it’s safe to say that my great-grandparents on both sides of the family were born there. I am not sure how my grandfather’s mother came to be half German Jew or whether the man, Shouse of Danville, Kentucky, who fathered her behaved like a father. It won’t change the fact that I am in part German Jew. My grandmother says that her grandmother was a Native American, but the rest of my ancestors must have come by sea.

Some were brought over against their will from Africa, and these ancestors weren’t allowed to bring their culture or even their language with them or share in American culture at that time. They were captive labourers. I can’t comprehend how these conditions must have stunted their emotional and intellectual growth, but that was probably the least of their worries.

A baby born to an African girl raped by an Englishman was half English as well as half African, but was considered a slave. Its development was restricted to the degradations of a slave’s environment. Its Englishness would be overlooked and denied for the benefit of plantation economy. Nobody bothered to challenge this convenient deception, but wasn’t the baby equally an enslaved Englishman? In this way, a new breed was born on American soil and forcibly chained to the American dream.

People see pictures of my father’s family and ask me what race they are. When I hear myself say, ‘They’re Black,’ it sounds ludicrous, because their skin is hardly brown. Since the sixties, the Black Power movement and radical chic, Black is what Americans of slave descent are called. Before that we were called Negroes, coloured, Nigras and niggers and Lord knows what else. As kids we used to say, ‘Sticks and stones can break my bones but names can never hurt me,’ but the naming of things is important. We rely on labels to identify and categorize everything around us.

The 26 million Americans that evolved out of the sexual abuse of the slave class never got a definitive name. Black is clearly inaccurate. Our appearances vary and represent the complete spectrum of facial features, skin colours, hair textures, eye colours and physical types. Even within a nuclear family unit there are those variations. As descendants of an enslaved people we developed socially and culturally in spite of our limited privileges. We were sustained by the promise that one day we might share in the freedom and equality that was talked about so much. One day it really should suffice to call us Americans.

On that 5 July in Paris, I decided that I wouldn’t wait any longer for someone else to come up with a suitable name, and picked up the nearest dictionary. It happened to be a French/English one, a bit weather-beaten but still useful. I hoped to find a word that would describe my being of mixed descent and also suggest my African heredity.

When I stumbled upon the French word mélange, which means a mixture and also contains part of the word ‘melanin’, dark pigment found in the skin, it hit me like fireworks. Melange. I repeated it over and over out loud and in my head. I wrote it big and wrote it small and tried different endings until I heard myself saying ‘Melangian’ (pronounced mi-lan-jian with the accent on the middle syllable). It sounded right, but I wanted to get a second opinion, so I called a Melangian friend in New York to ask him if he liked it and made quite a screeching row when he did. Then I hung up the phone and put headphones on and turned up the music so loud that it nearly deafened me and danced by myself.

So let me start this again … I am Melangian. I was born of war. I am of the race which evolved out of slavery. We have a distinct cultural history, and in spite of all the shit, we’ve survived.

In the Melangian family women are particularly important because for a long time family units weren’t lawfully permitted within the slave class. (If I said that during the first thirty years of the Victorian era, working-class people were not allowed to get married, you might get the picture and a sense of how recent it was.) I come from a long line of working women. They had no choice.

My grandmother, Edna Mae Graham, who helped raise me, was raised in Florida by her grandmother, Fannie Graham, who was born a slave. There’s no photograph of Fannie, she probably never had one taken, but my grandmother described her as ‘skinny and yella’ with a crook in her nose like mine. From what I gather, she must have been a hellraiser. I wish I could remember more of what my grandmother told me about her.

Before Fannie died, her granddaughter, Edna Mae, a lean ambitious nineteen-year-old, had already hotfooted to Philadelphia, where she married a handsome friend of her family’s, Henry Robinson. Within five years they had three children, Henry Jr, Inez and Thelma, all born before the Depression. Nobody is clear about Henry senior’s line of work but, for some suspect reason, he had enough money to keep them living in certain style. Thelma, the youngest, still remembers the big house with the piano in the parlour. For a Melangian man in the 1920s that was no mean feat. Unfortunately, he took his money when he left during the Depression. Edna still managed. She had a beautician’s licence and the family made do with the money she was paid for straightening women’s hair.

I used to long to hear Edna’s stories about her Southern childhood, but she rarely talked about it or her eleven brothers and sisters. Neither they nor her grandmother who raised her were enough to draw her back to Florida. She never went home again. She never talked about her home or her family except Fannie, and if you tried to pry, she’d shut you up pretty fast by saying that there was nothing to be gained from talking about that ‘slaverytime shit’. She had a way with words and wasn’t the kind of gentle little woman you could press into a discussion that she didn’t want to have.

Once, though, she told about the time her father carried her on his shoulders to meet his regiment which fought in a war that she was never able to specify. (Considering she was born in 1896, I assume it was the small skirmish America had with Spain in 1898 over Cuba’s independence.) I don’t remember what made her break her silence, but throughout my own childhood it was the only mental image I had of hers. There are no photographs of her apart from one large portrait taken when she was nineteen. I never liked the picture in its oval frame. It made her look too much like George Washington and didn’t show that her eyes were the colour of pale sienna set against her straw complexion, which was never marred by a pimple or a rash.

Edna’s son Henry Jr finished high school and enlisted in July 1938 and by 21 October, he was assigned to a recruit training regiment at a naval training centre in Norfolk, Virginia. Edna’s two teenage daughters, Inez and Thelma, were still at high school. Both girls were pretty and popular. After graduating, they joined in the war effort with jobs at Brewster’s airplane plant. Henry was stationed at Pearl Harbor – his fleet just missed Japan’s unexpected assault in December 1941. While he had to anticipate death like the rest of the fighting forces, Inez had created two new lives: my sister Pamala was born in 1942 and my brother Dennis in 1943. Edna was a devoted grandmother and Thelma a doting aunt, and a new generation fell under the command of the matriarch, which they maintained without male interference even after Inez’s marriage to a brilliant medical student from Boston named Blair Theodore Hunt Jr.

Blair and his two brothers, Ernest and Wilson, had the opportunity to finish their interrupted educations when the war ended. Blair had been on a scholarship to Harvard, but there were still a lot of college years ahead before he would become a psychiatrist. Nobody was crazy enough to let my arrival in 1946 stop him from returning to Boston and Harvard. We weren’t to see much of my father because of his medical studies. His appearances were rare but well received. Everybody was so busy surviving that I doubt they had much time to notice that I’d come and that he’d gone.

I had three mothers, with my grandmother Edna, my aunt Thelma and my mother, known as Ikey, sharing the load. It was taken for granted in our household that women were completely capable of everything from raising a family and bringing home a regular wage packet to self-defence. Edna’s motto was: ‘If you want something done, do it yourself.’ To shovel a snow-banked sidewalk, stoke the furnace and provide was considered women’s work. Edna had been raised in this tradition and it is likely that her grandmother was, too. I was very late to comprehend that elsewhere women were not ruling the roost, shovelling the shit and kicking ass.

What little I did hear about my ancestors was predominantly about the women, and it left me a lot of scope to elaborate on them in my imagination. They weren’t prominent, but I did have them tucked in all the corners of my mind. Subsequently, it was these who spurred my determination and whom I idolized.

All my grandmother told me of her Indian great-grandmother, simply known as Grandma Mary, was that ‘when an overseer came to mess with Mary in the kitchen, she rammed a knife in his gut’. It didn’t enter my head that this may only have been a tale. Mary’s courage was there for me to imitate and live up to. And when I heard that Fannie Graham ‘wouldn’t take no shit off nobody’ and could do anything a man could do, Fannie became a role model and was always there for reference.

So the tradition I hoped to live up to as a child was as much established by these heroic foremothers as it was by my mother, her sister and my grandmother.

I can’t see air, but I accept it’s there. In the same way, I accept that I’m influenced by the unseen parade of women who have gone before me. Sometimes I wonder if I inherited them or if they inherited me.