for each—“Out of the Nest,” “First Lessons,” “Child’s Play”—that also functioned as metaphors. Somehow, thinking of a life as composed of chapters made the writing of my own life, the understanding of it, seem possible. And so, the chapter titles for my own work—“Combat Zones,” “Vertigo,” “Safe Houses”—slowly came into my consciousness. I began to scribble chapter headings as I read your memoir, long before I would write all that needed to follow.
In 1995, I am rereading I Dwell in Possibility for my course Cross-Cultural Issues in Memoir. As I reread your account of your alcoholism, I realize that I haven’t yet described my own alcoholism as a teenager although I am very near the end of my writing.
Urged on by your account, I begin to pen mine. Alongside notes about your work, one of my diary entries from this time reads: I also want to write about how much I drank. And another: I wrote the scene of me on the yellow line of the highway, passed out drunk. Susan [my best friend] standing above me, trying to take care of me.
From there, I begin exploring the reasons for my own alcoholism, coming to understand that yours was, in part, a response to your experience as a passive witness to atrocity; that mine was, in part, a response to the sexual abuse by a caregiver I experienced as a child. Linking these events—between and within our lives—explained what had been, for me, the formerly inexplicable: my alcoholism, hypervigilance, chronic illness.
As Virginia Woolf wrote, no book is a single birth. Each is related to other books and must be so understood. And so it is with your book and my book.
It is the spring of 1995, and I am walking to Hunter College. I carry in my briefcase a copy of I Dwell in Possibility, which I will be teaching. This day, like each day I walk to Hunter, I am edgy and careful, not knowing what I will encounter upon my arrival. For several days during the semester, the college had been surrounded by police vans in anticipation of another student protest against budget cuts and tuition hikes. Throughout the early spring, there have been sit-ins and teach-ins; recently there was a march and a peaceful protest of students and faculty in front of City Hall. During the demonstration, protesters were corralled closer and closer together by mounted police. The periphery is sealed. No one can leave. I thought they wanted us to stampede so they could fire upon us, a colleague later tells me. We were all shouting, “Stay calm, stay calm,” but we felt like we were suffocating. I thought that many of us would die.
I turn the corner and see a phalanx of police in full riot gear with bandoleers of bullets across their chest. They are ranged across Lexington Avenue, the street that fronts our college, and they are holding automatic weapons.
The policemen are there not because there is a student demonstration, but because there might be one. Rudolph Giuliani is mayor, and his administration is dedicated to maintaining law and order. My students and I are experiencing, firsthand, what this means. Many of us feel like we are living in a police state where one false move, even during peaceful protest, can result in carnage.
The students’ favorite protest strategy is to form a human barricade across Lexington Avenue, the downtown traffic artery that fronts the main entrance to Hunter College. It is a very clever and very successful strategy because stopping traffic on just this one block snarls traffic all along Manhattan’s East Side.
Even when traffic isn’t stopped, student leaders set up portable microphones and give speeches, explaining how the proud tradition of free tuition at the City University (of which Hunter is a part) has been abandoned. The student leaders remind us that investing in the education of the city’s poor makes good economic sense long-term. They excoriate the city’s leadership for its hostility toward the City University, which can only be explained by racism and classism.
I am proud of my activist students. I have some of them in my classes, for I always teach literature courses that discuss issues of race, class, and gender, and student activists gravitate to these courses. This is an important time in the City University’s history, when the ability of poor students—my students—to afford a quality education is being severely threatened. I know that if tuition hikes go through, many of my students will have to postpone their education or curtail it completely.
That I am teaching I Dwell in Possibility during this historical moment in my life, in my students’ lives, enables us to understand your work more deeply and to understand our own historical moment. Through your work we come to feel what it is like to live through and bear witness to violence as you did. Many of us are nervous; many of us are having nightmares. My body has broken out in enormous hives. Many students come to me during office hours to discuss whether they will take part in protests; many come telling me they feel they are in danger.
At the beginning of the semester, before we read your work, we talk about the kind of people who might write memoir. The students tell me that only important people—leaders who participate in history and important events—write memoirs. Ordinary people like themselves, who live their lives largely on the periphery of events, have nothing important to tell the world. Even my most activist students do not believe they have important narratives to record.
One reason I teach memoir is to obliterate this false notion. To show my students that each life has a story. That each life is lived in history. That each life merits recording—insights so intrinsic to I Dwell in Possibility.
In my diary I wrote: The students loved Toni McNaron’s memoir. They were upset by her description of what happened to black families during the civil rights movement in Birmingham. We discussed how President Clinton spoke about how hate groups and hate speech fuel violence. And what a scary country this is and always has been, some of my students said. Founded on racism and exploitation. One student, whose family was from the South, said she was glad to read this history from this point of view; that she liked seeing such a frank examination of racism from a white person’s perspective. We applied the insights from McNaron’s book to what is happening at Hunter now.
During that semester, my students wrote you letters of appreciation. They told you that reading your work allowed them to think about their lives in a new way—that they, like you, lived in a historical moment; and that being a “silent witness” to history means that you have participated in it, too—a paradox you unlocked for them.
All this they learned when they read that unforgettable moment you wrote about. It was on a Sunday in the summer of 1956: a group of black families brought their lunches to the park near the Birmingham Public Library for an event planned by the NAACP to integrate the city’s open spaces. You witnessed “a crowd of rowdy whites” heckling and cursing the families, you saw them becoming increasingly more abusive, and then the police cars arrived, and you had hope that the picnicking families would be protected; but this was Jim Crow’s South, and so, instead, the police unleashed their dogs and they corralled the people and terrorized them, the children too, for half an hour, and you saw a dog bite a woman’s buttocks, and the black people carted off to jail.
I stood, mute and paralyzed, you wrote.
And then, again, later in that summer, another group of black families came to the park, and this time the police hooked up power hoses to fire hydrants and turned them on the crowd. You saw grown men and women, children, blasted along the ground, their skin scraping, their bodies hurtling; you saw them choked and blinded by the water; you saw mothers crazed with terror at the sight of their little ones being hurt. And, as you wrote,
No white person had made a single move to stop this atrocity, including me.
Those moments in your life, and your memory of them, and your reflection upon them, forced you into thinking about what it means to be a silent witness to atrocity. And, importantly, all this forced you to think about your place in history, your responsibility, and your silence. Now, many years later, I am beginning a fourth memoir, about my Southern Italian grandparents, and returning to I Dwell in Possibility. I can only imagine where my third reading will take me.
When you like a book, Henry Miller said, write a letter to the writer, to the publisher, and to a friend: reading a book begins a conversation. And reading important writing that has had an impact upon your life puts you in the author’s