I just read a chapter of “Zami” (© 1982, 17th Printing, Ten Speed Press). What a clean writing style. It has just enough words to get the point across, plain language, words so natural you don’t notice you’re reading a book. Zami is a teenage memoir of being one of only three black kids at Hunter College High School, circa 1948.
The full title is "Zami, A New Spelling of My Name” by Audre Lorde. Lorde recalls being 15, playing hooky to sit on the couch in midday with her best friend Genevieve, drinking Champale and toasting marshmallows on a pencil with a match. Other times the girls ride the open air double-decker omnibus “singing union songs at the tops of our lungs”.
After Zami’s friend Genevieve commits suicide, Lorde inventories the things the two teens never got a chance to do together:
- Learn Swahili.
- Take a course in international obscenities.
- Smoke reefer.
- Go to a Village gay bar or any bar anywhere.
- See Martha Graham’s dance troupe.
- Visit Pearl Primus.
- Derail the freight that took circus animals to Florida.
- Write THE BOOK.
- Make love.
Zami covers teen life in old, dirty New York in similar fashion as Jim Carrol’s "The Basketball Diaries".
If you ever go for New York teen bios I recommend Zami and Basketball Diaries first but I also enjoyed, slightly less, the more famous “a Tree Grows in Brooklyn” (which is set in the Williamsburg neighborhood where I now teach) as well as Henry Roth’s “Some Call it Sleep” (memorable for his father’s diarrhea problems at work and young Henry’s role standing on the Harlem train platform, daily pitching a pail of home cooked, soothing food as his dad drove the train past 135th Street).
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