They had three children, Phyllis, Helen, and Audrey. They got jobs at the Waldorf Astoria, but when the hotel closed her mother worked as a scullery maid at a tea shop until the owner fired her because she was Black.
Her mother, Linda, and father, Byron, came here in their early twenties, having been married a year. Once she visited she saw her mother’s powers walking through those streets. Lorde begins her chronological narrative with a brief reflection on Grenada, where her parents were from. She is “woman forever” and her body is “a living representation of other life older longer wiser” (7).
She has felt the triad of mother and father and child, and the triad of grandmother mother and daughter. Lorde says she always wished she could be man and woman, holding the strongest parts of both her mother and father within herself. This is how she came out whole this is how she became herself and Afrekete. Then there was the first woman she loved and left, and the “battalion of arms where I often retreated for shelter and sometimes found it” (5). There was the white woman who ran up to her car once, screaming for help until she saw Lorde was Black. There was Louise Briscoe, who died in her mother’s rooming house. There were many of these women, like DeLois, the woman in Harlem who was “big and Black and special” (5) and loved herself. Lorde, who writes this work in the first-person perspective and mostly in the past tense, begins by saying that while her father left his mark on her, it was the women in her life who led her home.
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