Talk Stories Read online

  For George Trow and for Sandy Frazier,

  For Rick Hertzberg and for Veronica Geng and for Tony Hiss, For Mark Singer and for Suzannah Lessard and for Kennedy Fraser and

  For Jonathan Schell.

  And for always and always again,

  For Mr. Shawn, whom I think about each day with love and whom I shall never, ever forget

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Foreword

  Introduction

  West Indian Weekend

  Daytime Dancing, A Report

  The Magic Is Blue

  A Commercial Party

  Time with Pryor

  Bells and Drells

  Lunchtime

  Free-ee-ee

  Junior Miss

  A Civic Gathering

  In Central Park

  The Fourth

  Boz Scaggs

  A Gathering

  Notes and Comment

  Notes and Comment

  Interests

  Charm

  Garland Jeffreys

  Nothing in Mind

  Notes and Comment

  Notes and Comment

  Pippo

  Honors

  Dinosaurs

  Kenya

  Cheese

  Notes and Comment

  Soap

  Collecting

  Memorandum

  Recollections

  Off to China

  Office Workers

  The World of Letters

  Over Here

  Cat

  G-L-O-R-I-A

  The Ages of Woman

  Festival

  Unveiling

  Miss Jamaica

  Hair

  Thirty Years Ago

  Noon

  Notes and Comment

  Mayor

  Books

  Colloquy About Sting

  Three Parties

  Expense Account

  The Governor’s Party

  Sara

  Runner

  Party

  Royalty

  Two Book Parties

  Audition

  Benefit

  New

  Great

  Romance

  Novel

  Cat Story

  The Exercise

  Car Questions

  Tableware

  Prince

  Notes and Comment

  The Apprentice

  Meeting

  Birthday Party at an East Side Town House

  Foam and Brass

  Knitting

  Notes and Comment

  Luncheon

  At Mr. Chow’s

  ALSO BY JAMAICA KINCAID

  Copyright Page

  Foreword

  This is a story I always tell about Jamaica:

  When she and I were staff writers at The New Yorker magazine with offices across the hall from each other—twenty-five years ago—we often had dinner together at the end of the day. We would leave work on the late side, after the office was mostly empty and rush hour had eased, and walk or take the subway from Forty-third Street in Manhattan, where The New Yorker was, to Jamaica’s apartment on West Twenty-second. Often we stopped at a store along the way and bought something to cook. Then I would sit in her apartment and drink three or four beers while she made dinner, and then we would eat at a small table while watching TV shows like Andy of Mayberry or Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman or the miniseries Roots. After dinner we would talk for a while, and then I would go home.

  Sometimes on the way to her apartment we would buy our dinner at a store called the Chelsea Charcuterie. This was a little gourmet-food store on Ninth Avenue near her place. Nowadays you can get gourmet items such as cilantro or curried chicken salad at the A&P, but back then gourmet shops like the Chelsea Charcuterie existed hardly anywhere; this store was an early hint of the gourmet-food explosion that was to come. The owners of the store were about our age and they liked Jamaica and let her run a tab. Once, she told me she owed them over eight hundred dollars, an amount so large I could not imagine how it could ever be paid off. Jamaica usually talked to Francie, one of the owners, for a long time while she decided on what to buy. One evening she was shopping, and she and Francie were chatting, when a guy with a loud boom-box radio came in and asked for change for a twenty. In high-minded irritation Jamaica turned to him and said, “You know, this isn’t the kind of store where you can just walk in and ask for change for a twenty.” I remember the guy as little, skinny, and pointy, with an aerodynamically shaped face that looked as if you could throw it and it would make a big circle in the air and end up at your feet. The guy turned to Jamaica and said, furiously and matter-of-factly, “Lady, I’m going to go home, get my gun, come back here, and blow you away.” Then he walked quickly out of the store.

  I had arrived in New York at the age of twenty-three with the idea of becoming a writer. I was always keyed up and scared and full of expectations then, and sometimes I met people who were like no one I had ever met before, people who did amazing things. This moment in the Chelsea Charcuterie was a height of amazement for me. Just about everybody I had ever known, including me, would have left the store right away. Shootings used to happen in New York all the time back then. There had been a shooting not far from that store, and I had seen the victim’s bright red blood on the sidewalk. After the pointy guy left, however, Jamaica merely continued to shop. Her consideration of the items which would be tastiest for our dinner became, if anything, even more leisurely and serene. I desperately wanted to get out of there, but of course I couldn’t show my fear, not in front of a girl. And I couldn’t just run away—that would have been ungallant. Silently I accepted that in a few minutes my friend and I would be dead, and I regarded the items in the store in a mood of self-pitying farewell; I remember in particular a low barrel of rough blond wood filled with Ghanaian coffee beans.

  A lot of the exhilaration of those years for me was in seeing who could be the bravest, who could be the coolest. I kept a mental scorecard of brave and cool deeds: I saw young New Yorker veterans George Trow and Tony Hiss come into the office an hour or two before an issue’s deadline and in one draft turn out Talk of the Town stories as elegant and effortless as a Will Rogers rope trick. I saw a guy climb the outside of the World Trade Center, 110 stories tall. I saw the comedian Richard Pryor performing live in concert at the Felt Forum when he made the audience laugh so hard that laughter became a painful spasm they couldn’t control. I saw a city meter maid hurry over to a fallen-down street person I wouldn’t have touched with gloves on and gently cradle his head in her lap until an ambulance arrived. I saw the actor John Belushi deflect the aggressive attentions of a drunken fan who should have been in custody and do it in a way that turned the encounter into a playful exercise in theater. But to me, nobody was braver than Jamaica. She didn’t try to be shocking or “transgressive” or audacious, those imitations of bravery done mainly for effect; her bravery was just the way she was, and it came natural and uninterrupted from inside.

  Once, at some fancy New York function, she met and talked to Jacqueline Onassis, and shortly after, at another function happened to be introduced to her again. Jacqueline Onassis greeted Jamaica the second time without any sign of recognition; Jamaica said to her, “We’ve met,” and walked away. Once in a movie theater a thuggish guy was talking loudly behind us and Jamaica asked him to be quiet and he cursed at her and said if she didn’t turn around and shut up he would cut her face; she gave him a few choice words and went back to watching the movie. I took her trout fishing in a deep and fast river in Vermont and she waded in after me in jeans and sneakers; only later I found out that she didn’t know how to swim. She and I used to go up to Harlem sometimes to visit a woman she knew on 128th St
reet or to see shows at the Apollo Theatre. This was back in the days of Black Power and honky-go-home, and people almost always made remarks to us. A lady in a hat called Jamaica a “black concubine,” lots of guys speculated about us loudly and obscenely. Whatever rudeness people said, Jamaica would agree with in the polite and helpful manner of a first-grade teacher: “Yes, you’re right, I am [whatever].” “Yes, that’s true, I do [whatever].” Once, some guys harassed us from the windows of a prison bus and she yelled back that at least she wasn’t a criminal going off to jail.

  Then there was the pajama phase. I can’t leave that out. Once, she spent several days in Sloan-Kettering, a cancer hospital in Manhattan, for surgery that could have been serious but luckily wasn’t, and while she was there she fell in love with the pajamas the hospital issued to her. These pajamas were of a crepe-like seersucker, blue-and-white striped, with matching knee-length bathrobe and paper slippers. She liked the pajamas so much that after she got out of the hospital she wore them everywhere. I would show up at her apartment—she was living downtown then, in SoHo—to escort her to a movie or a New Yorker event uptown, and she would come to the door in pajamas, robe, and paper slippers. I have no fashion sense at all, so I held my tongue, but I almost expressed an opinion that wearing pajamas for evening attire makes you look kind of insane. I knew she would wear them regardless of what I said. The time of year was spring, so at least her clothing was not unseasonable. Getting a cab in Manhattan is often difficult, but I learned that when you are accompanied by a six-foot-tall black woman in pajamas, it is more difficult still.

  For us, the whole point was the writing. Each bold deed we saw or did was like a sketch of what a good piece of writing should be; we were just learning how to write, but somehow we knew that fearlessness was key. It sounds melodramatic to say that we believed we must write or die, but then youth itself is melodramatic. Our opinions about ourselves and other writers were merciless and extreme. Jamaica believed that one’s writing should always come first, before one’s personal life, and when she was twenty-five she made me promise that if she ever got married and had children I must take her aside and tell her she was no longer a writer. (Of course, she has now been married for many years and has two children, the older one a teenager.) This youthful fierceness of purpose Jamaica directed toward writing short nonfiction pieces for the Talk of the Town department of The New Yorker, and in particular for the man who was the magazine’s editor, William Shawn. Each Talk story she wrote back then was a jump further into writing, a new exploration of her voice within the magazine’s discipline of subject matter and form. In a sense, the record of Jamaica’s becoming a writer is the collection of her Talk pieces assembled here.

  The first piece of hers the magazine published was a report she did (at the urging of George Trow, and with a short introduction by him) on the subject of a West Indian Day parade in Brooklyn. Jamaica’s account stood out three dimensionally from the text around it like a combination of regular print and Braille, giving notice of a new voice in the magazine and a major writer on the way. Later she said that in doing that piece she understood for the first time that writing wasn’t something outside her but just her thoughts inside her head. Oddly, her first Talk piece was also the only one in which her name appeared; the items in the department were almost all anonymous back then. From that beginning she went on to write pieces about concerts, promotional parties, people famous at the time, and an unexpected and moving description of a convention of New York City police detectives in which the loud plaidness of their suitcoats was a recurring theme. Some of her pieces were parodies of Nancy Drew-type adventure fiction for girls, others were dialogues between made-up characters in which the actual event being described emerged only in shattered, cubistic form. Some of her pieces were witty cries of frustration at the magazine’s sometimes suffocating proprieties.

  You couldn’t use curse words, or dirty words, or write about sex in Talk of the Town. You couldn’t write about religion. You couldn’t write about the journalistic topic of the week, the one every reporter at every other publication was writing about, unless you did it in a completely different way. You couldn’t be too mean. Stories involving violence or blood sports were out; ditto anything that was overly commercial or boosterish or had been done too recently before. Also, what you wrote should be about or take place in New York City; this was The New Yorker, after all. Mr. Shawn did not state his taboos and restrictions explicitly—and all these were his, no question—but you learned them through the painful rejection of submitted ideas and through stories that were written and handed in and never heard from again.

  And yet aside from that, amazingly, you were pretty much free. Within certain boundaries—which could even be crossed if you had luck and knew how—you could write about anything you liked in any way you liked. It’s hard to imagine a major magazine today being so self-willed and heedless of convention in its editorial policy, harder still to imagine such a policy succeeding as The New Yorker’s did. For Jamaica, the discipline was a challenge and the freedom heady. One week she decided to submit as her Talk story a list of the expenses incurred in reporting the story. Another week she wrote a long, introspective letter in the first person describing a train trip she had taken to New York from Cleveland. Another week she went into detail about a Thanksgiving dinner she had just made which copied to the cranberry a recent Thanksgiving dinner of a Midwestern family as described in a women’s magazine. As her Talk stories grew more adventuresome and complex and skilled, the fictional pieces which would make her famous began to appear in the magazine. Her Talk stories also served as experimental warm-ups for her much-anthologized fiction works like “Girl,” “At the Bottom of the River,” and “In the Night.”

  If the inventiveness and determination in her Talk stories were Jamaica’s alone, the editorial ear was Mr. Shawn’s. This collection can also be seen as the account of an apprenticeship, or as an unfolding conversation between a young writer and a man who had been editing Talk stories since well before she was born. Adding dimension to their relationship was the fact that a few years after Jamaica made me promise to tell her she was no longer a writer if she married, she met and married Mr. Shawn’s son Allen. (A composer and teacher of music theory, Allen has gotten to know his wife’s outspokenness well; his reply, after a particularly frank comment of hers: “Dear, please! Mince words!”) Recently people have written a lot about Mr. Shawn’s strengths and weaknesses as an editor and a human being. Usually everybody agrees that he was perhaps the greatest editor of his day, without offering many specific examples of his editorial skill. This collection, with its invisible plot of a unique new writer being allowed a freedom to emerge story by story, is evidence also of a great editor doing his job.

  For readers familiar with Jamaica’s fiction, these pieces will give an idea of what she was like when she was young and just starting out. Some may recognize pieces they remember but hadn’t realized were hers. In virtually all the pieces, stylistic elements which would reappear in her fictional works can be seen in nascent form; other flourishes of style found here were once-only performances done just for the heck of it and left forever behind. Unlike many Talk pieces, and unlike almost all writing in magazines, these pieces published originally with no signature turn out now to be unmistakably by a specific person—they’re completely cast in Jamaica’s voice, and filled with her sensibility.

  Some of them I remember seeing for the first time in her typewriter, half-done. I used to go across the hall to Jamaica’s office and read what she was writing and rush back to my office in a fever of literary desire. I sometimes wished the story in my typewriter were hers, and I imagined copying hers, or just taking it by subterfuge: “Good job, Kincaid—no need to stay around—I’ll just finish this up for you and see that it gets to Mr. Shawn!” Watching a piece of hers emerge out of empty air gave to writing a live-action vividness that words on paper don’t usually have. In my saner and less covetous moments, I used my envy
as inspiration to try and write something myself, happy just to be playing on the same field.

  Usually we were broke or almost broke in our Talk-writing days, but after reading Jamaica, or even after talking to her, I often felt suddenly wealthy, as if I had just remembered a large and long-forgotten bank account in my name. I think this book will make other readers feel the same. Her writing is a shared plenitude, a promise of more where that came from. In these early pieces, as in all her work, Jamaica Kincaid appears as a writer of boldness and encouragement who keeps on showing us the ever-dawning possibilities in writing and in the world.

  —Ian Frazier

  Introduction

  All sentences, all paragraphs about this part of my life, my life as a writer, must begin with George Trow. It is possible that he will not like this, but it is the truth all the same, I must begin with George Trow.

  When I was young I wanted to write and I did not know how to do that, write, and I didn’t even know how it was done, but I wanted to do it all the same, and so I used to go around and tell everyone who asked me what I did, that I was a writer and if I was not yet a writer, I wanted to be one all the same. At one minute I wanted to be a writer, and instinctively realizing I was in America, the next minute I decided I was a writer, and so when anyone asked me who I was, I said, I am a writer. I did not know exactly what that means, I still do not know exactly what that means, but even now, when I am asked what it is that I am, I say, I am a writer.

  It was as a writer that I applied to a magazine called then, and still called even now, Mademoiselle, for a job as a writer, and they said no, and when I told my friends or anyone else that I had applied for a job at that magazine (called Mademoiselle then and still called that now) and was turned down, they said to me that a magazine like that, Mademoiselle, would not hire black girls. How stupid of them, Mademoiselle, I thought, for I had grown up in a place where quite a few people I knew had been girls and many, many, many more than that had been black, and so I paid no attention to Mademoiselle then and even less than that now. I then asked the editor of a magazine called Ingenue if I could write for her and she said yes, though what I would actually do was only related to writing in that it involved ink and paper and words. I went around asking people who were regarded as accomplished what they were like when they were the age of the Ingenue reader. I could now say that it bored me beyond measure, but that would not be true at all, for I had known real boredom, I had survived being a child. I was not bored by my subjects’ answers because at that time I did not hear anything anyone else said, I only heard my own voice, I was only interested in my own story.