77 pages • 2 hours read
Zami: A New Spelling of My Name
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Chapters 3-6Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 3 Summary
Audre starts public school in a special class for legally-blind children while her sisters go to a Catholic school and are constantly threatened with being transferred if they misbehave. Public school is notorious for being violent, whereas Catholic school is safe and orderly. Audre only begins talking once she learns how to read: “I don’t know if I didn’t talk earlier because I didn’t know how, or if I didn’t talk because I had nothing to say that I would be allowed to say without punishment” (21-22).
Audre credits a female librarian as being the person to teach her how to read. Lordewas in the library, throwing a tantrum, because she had not been allowed to go to story-time with her older sisters, and Mrs. Augusta Baker sat next to her and read her story after story. Audre was enamored by the books she could see with new eyeglasses and said she wanted to read. Her mother is ecstatic that Audre can speak and is intelligent, uncharacteristically scooping her up and kissing Audre affectionately in public.
Her mother sits with Audre at the table, teaching her the alphabet backwards and forwards, along with how to print her name, and even though Linda hadn’t “gone beyond the seventh grade, she had been in charge of teaching the first grade children their letters during her last year at Mr. Taylor’s School in Grenville” (24). Audre doesn’t like how the Y in her name looks, so she omits it from her name when she learns how to write.
When Audre gets to kindergarten, the teacher gives her crayons and strange notebooks to write the first letter of her name in, which Audre believesis not how one should write. She asks for a pencil and normal paper but is rebuffed, and when she refuses to write with crayons, her teacher threatens to tell her mother. Audre writes her full name and then raises her hand, anxious to be considered good by her teacher. Her teacher gets mad that she hasn’t followed directions and tears out the page. Audre starts crying and doesn’t stop until after her mother comes to pick her upand threatens“to box my ears for me if I didn’t stop embarrassing her on the street” (26). Eventually, Audre explains what happened, and her mother and father decide to talk to the teacher, who claimsAudre won’t follow directions, which her mother knows is untrue.Linda Lorde also feelsthat it is the school’s responsibility to teach students.
Linda puts Audre in first grade at the Catholic school, stressing that Audre is unruly and needs firm punishment. Audre’s teacher, Sister Mary of Perpetual Help, agrees: “A week after I started school she sent a note home to my mother asking her not to dress me in so many layers of clothing because then I couldn’t feel the strap on my behind when I was punished” (27). Sister Mary does not seem to like students or teachingand divides the class up into two groups: The Fairies—the good students—and the Brownies—the bad students who misbehave and/or can’t read.
Audre is only in the Fairies twice that year. She and one of her seatmates, a dirty and rude boy named Alvin who couldn’t read but drew pictures of bombing airplanes, devise a system in which he would turn to the correct page and Audre would whisper the words to him, as Audre is bad with numbers while Alvin is bad with words. They both get out of the Brownies, but Alvin disappears after Christmas. Years later, Audre finds out Alvin has died of tuberculosis.
For their first writing assignment, the students are supposed to cut out words from the newspaper to form a sentence. Audre’s sentence is more complex than the other students, and Sister Mary believes that someone has helped her, and calls Audre a liar when Audre says it is her original work. A note from her father the next day supports Audre’s stance, and she gets moved into the Fairies. She stays there until she breaks her expensive glasses, after which her mother makes her go to school anyway and Sister Mary makes her sit in the back with a dunce cap on. Since Audre can’t see the board, she plays games with the rainbows of light by blinking her eyes quickly.
Summary: “How I Became a Poet”
Lorde says, “My mother had a special and secret relationship with words […] I did not speak until I was four” (31). Her mother has euphemisms which Audre doesn’t understand as a child, so she made up her own ideas about what the idioms were: “The sensual content of life was masked and cryptic, but attended to in well-coded phrases” (32). Audre remembers the sensual smell of her mother as Audre sat between her legs while her mother brushed her hair. She also remembers crawling into bed with her, playing with the hot-water bottle against her mother’s stomach and nuzzling her breasts.
Chapter 4 Summary
Audre wants a little sister more than anything because she feels like an only child in comparison to the comradery her older sisters share. Audre believes that she can summon a tiny sister via magic by stepping on all the sidewalk lines in one day, since her parents have no desire to have another child and she can’t adopt a sister. She makes figures out of clay and tries to bring them to life with her mother’s glycerin and rosewater or vanilla extract.
Audre is not allowed to play outside with other children and is rarely left out of her mother’s sight, except when her mother goes back inside to get her coat and lock the windows. One day, when Audre is waiting on the stoop, she sees Toni, “my lifelong dream of a doll-baby come to life” (37). Toni is in Maryjane shoes and the most beautiful outfitAudre has ever seen, and has red, curly hair. Audre imagines keeping Toni in her pillow as she rubs her hands on the fur pompom of Toni’s hat and the gold buttons of her coat. Toni givesAudre peppermint candy and asks her to play. Audre puts Toni on her lap, turning her over and lifting her coat and dress to see if she is real or a doll. Before Audre can lift her underwear, Linda comes out. Audre expects to be punished, but her mother doesn’t notice what Audre is doing. Toni asks Audre to come out and play tomorrow, but Linda hurries Audre away. Audre asks Linda to buy her a red coat like Toni’s, and Linda chastisesAudre for not asking her properly. Audre realizes that she wouldn’t be able to go outside tomorrow to play with Toni because her mother will be cleaning all day. Days later, when Audre finally is outside on the stoop again, Toni is nowhere to be found. Audre never sees Toni again.
Chapter 5 Summary
Audre’s sister holds her out the window, but her mom comes back just in time to rescue her and beats both her and her sister: “I was always very jealous of my two older sisters, because they were older and therefore more privileged, and because they had each other for a friend” (43). Her sisters, Helen and Phyllis, also have privacy, which Audre only finds for short periods in the bathroom, as she sleeps on a cot in her parents’ room.
For summer, they go to the Connecticut shore on vacation, and the time is special because Audre’s father is around during the day and they get to eat new types of food. However, Audre also has to have dilating drops for her eyes every summer, so she always remembers the beach with a silvery glare. The second summer, she has to share a bed with her sisters, and even though she is still put to bed early, she keeps herself awake until her sisters come to bed. Audre would pretend to be asleep, but her sisters knew and would threaten her with the boogeyman. They pinch her, and Audre threatens to tell their mom about the pinches and the stories the two of them tell in bed at night: “they told each other stories in endless installments, making up the episodes as they went along, from fantasies engendered by the radio adventure shows to which we were all addicted in those days” (46).
Phyllis doesn’t care about Audre listening to their stories, but Helen—the closest to Audre in age—is annoyed at Audre’s interrupting questions and wants to wait until Audre’s asleep. They make Audre promise not to tell or to say anything, but right after Helen starts a story, Audre corrects her. Helen gets mad and refuses to continue her story. Audre realizes she will not get to hear the end of it because her sisters will wait until they are alone to continue it. Audre tries to apologize, but Helen won’t have it, so Audre decides to make up a story of her own.
Chapter 6 Summary
During the summers, Audre walks for miles uphill with her sisters to the comic book store run by a fat white man who sold coverless comic books for half-price. The man, always smoking a cigar, lifts Audre to look into the bins and molests her while doing so. If she lets him touch her, he throws in an extra comic book for free. Audre hates it and feels dirty afterwards. Audre learns that she can avoid him by sticking with her sisters, but then she doesn’t get a free comic book.
Even though Audre can’t yet read, this is one of the few times she is allowed out of the house because her mother allows Audre and her sisters to play in the street. They also run errands for their father, including getting his shoes shined.
The sisters walk past Colonial Park, stopping to look longingly at the park’s grounds and pool, which cost ten cents for admission. They eat saltines and bananas for lunch and continue trudging up the hills to the store. Audre is always terrified of falling down the hills, believing that she will roll without stopping. People “would jump aside to keep from being knocked over and crushed by the screaming little fat girl on her slide down to the Harlem River waters” (52). She thinks she will float away to the mythic Spitting Devil, where black children drown.
Chapters 3-6 Analysis
These chapters explore Lorde’s feelings of loneliness as she grows up in isolation from many of her peers and the rest of her family. At school, Audre is one of few black students. Moreover, one of the few other students who will actually speak to her dies. Similarly, when she makes a friend outside, Toni, she only interacts with her for a few minutes, and then never sees her again. Although her mother is attempting to protect her daughter from the outside world by sheltering her, she winds up isolating Audre from her peers and even from the rest of her family. Audre is similarly isolated from her sisters, who share secrets and a room, whereas Audre is kept close to her mother, sleeping on a fold-out cot in her parents’ room. This loneliness and isolation correlates to a lack of freedom, both at school and at home. Audre is set up almost from the beginning of the book to rebel against her parents, especially her mother.
Even though Audre is undoubtedly incredibly lonely, she is also exposed to sexuality at a young age, perhaps due to her isolation. An isolated child is often the most vulnerable and Audre is nothing if not equally vulnerable and isolated. Although she attempts to explore some version of her own sexuality during her interaction with Toni, the incident with the comic store man demonstrates the kind of commodification of sexuality evident within American society. This commodification is exacerbated by Audre growing up in poverty, with her parents worried over the cost of eyeglasses and Audre desiring to play in the park that charges admission. The audience witnesses the social stratification of the economy, which is tied explicitly to race. In this way, we see the financial ramifications of World War II for Audre’s family, as her father is able to get more and better paying jobs and eventually move to a nicer part of the city. In general, many black families were able to move up in society as a result of the jobs generated by the war, and Audre’s family is no different.
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