Audre Lorde Pt. 1

Audre Lorde called herself a "black feminist lesbian mother poet warrior," but for a lot of people, she's best known for the "poet" part. She was way ahead of her time on a lot of social fronts, including feminism, gay rights, and the sexual revolution.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff you Missed in History Class from house
stuff works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm crazy and I'm Holly Fry, and you sound a
little I do. I'm getting over from credit, so I
have an interesting voice. I could sing some torch songs

(00:21):
this week, but I won't. Instead, I'll just record things
and people can enjoy a completely different timber to my
voice or not enjoy it. That's far too Yes. Well,
and on the subject of enjoying or not enjoying, we've
had several two part episodes lately. We keep accidentally picking
things that have so much depth that it's hard to
get him in one. Yeah. Yeah. And some people love

(00:42):
two part episodes and some people hate them. So if
you hate two part episodes, I'm sorry. We're likely going
to be dialing back on them and then coming months. Yeah, well,
we'll choose some things that are more conducive to being
in one thirty minute episode be encapsulated. Right. Today, we
are going to talk in our first of two parts
about Audrey Lord, who called herself a quote black feminist,

(01:07):
lesbian mother poet warrior. It's an awesome string. Yeah, that's
a lot of adjectives it is, or a lot of
descriptive nouns. But for a lot of people she's best
known for like the poet part, or maybe also the
feminist part. She showed a great deal of promise as
a poet really early in her career and attracted the

(01:29):
attention and support of other really prominent poets, poets like
Length and Hughes and Gwendolen Brooks and Audrey and Rich
And she went on to just write prolifically and win
numerous awards for her writing. And on top of that,
she was way ahead of her time on all kinds
of social fronts, including feminism and gay rights and the

(01:50):
sexual revolution. And she was just unapologetic in her view
that you just can't address issues like sexism without also
examining their relationship to racism and homophobia and class struggles
and all of these other nuances and complexities that affect
people's identities and how they're treated well. And she also

(02:10):
struggled with depression for a lot of her life. She
wrote about it as well. Her books The Cancer Journals
and A Verst of Light chronicled her experience with breast cancer,
which was, as you can imagine, not always fun and
sunny affair. It was not at all that, and that's
something that will talk more about in the second part
of this two parter and a lot of college classes

(02:32):
and introductions to collection of her work and that sort
of thing. Addy Lord is presented as sort of this
larger than life black lesbian feminist icon, somebody who deeply
believed in the power of language and drew from multiple
aspects of her own identity, including her ethnicity, her race,
her sexual orientation, and her gender to fight for equality

(02:53):
on every possible front. And identity was really at the
heart of her work, and she felt that each person
had to really understand their own identity to be able
to really experience and relate to the world. Um Over
the next two episodes will be talking about the life
that led her to these views and influenced her creative work.
And so in the first part today we're going to

(03:15):
talk about her childhood, her early life, and her college years,
and then part two will pick up with her relationship
with a man named Ed Rollins, who was the father
of her two children, and that will take us also
through the end of her life and as often as
the case even with two episodes, will not be an
exhaustive Audrey Lord exploration. No, there's I think in um.

(03:38):
Any time you're doing two or left episodes on a topic,
you're never going to hit everything. If you do want it,
I'm gonna go ahead and and pitch this now and
I'll say it at the end of the next episode. Also,
if you do want a much more exhaustive view of
the life of Audrey Lord, there's a biography of her
called Warrior Poet UH that is quite thorough and extremely

(04:00):
well sourced. So so there you go. If you want
more pick up. So to talk about her, we really
need to talk about her perspective and how it started,
really uh with her parents, who were named Frederick Byron
and Linda Gertrude Belmar Lord. They were immigrants from Grenada

(04:21):
in the Southern Caribbean, Uh and her father had actually
been born in Barbados, though they moved from Grenada to Harlem,
New York in four during the Harlem Renaissance, and in
addition to seeing a huge amount of artistic and literary
and political work from the African American community at the time,
Harlem had also become home to a really growing community

(04:44):
of black immigrants from elsewhere in the world, including a
sizeable influx of people from the Caribbean, and the Lord's
immigrated on the advice of one of Linda's sisters who
had also moved to the US. In Grenada, Frederick had
been their town's first police constable and later he bought
a managed a store, so he was a respected and
successful person there, and they sold that store and most

(05:06):
of their possessions so that they could afford to buy
passage to the US. And their hope was that they
would make more money here in the U s where
we are than they could at home, and that then
they would kind of save that money and then go
back home with it right. But once they arrived, they
unfortunately did not find the plentiful work and good pay
that they were hoping for. Byron's experience back in Grenado

(05:29):
wasn't enough to overcome the fact that he was both
black and an immigrant, so they really had a hard
time finding employment. They were facing racism and discrimination wherever
they looked, and they finally wound up getting jobs at
the Waldorf Astoria. Frederick worked as a laborer unloading trucks,
and Linda worked as a maid, which was a job

(05:50):
that she had to pass for white to be able
to get When the hotel closed, Frederick got a job
pushing an apple cart, and Linda continued to pass as
a white woman so she could get another job as
a maid, letting her employer believe that in fact, she
was Spanish. She kept this job until Frederick, who could
not pass for white, picked up her paycheck for her

(06:10):
one day because she was sick, and her employer, upon
discovering this, immediately fired her. Hard to even say those words.
That's there's a lot of this story. It's hard to say.
The Great Depression came shortly after that, and Audrey's parents
reconciled themselves to the idea that it just wasn't going

(06:31):
to be feasible for them to go back to Granada
for a while, and in fact, they never were able
to move back. So Audrey was raised by immigrant parents
who didn't feel like they were at home where they lived.
Her mother especially considered Granada and not New York to
be her home. Linda spoke of Granada often to her daughter.
She made it sound beautiful, romantic and idyllic, and you know,

(06:54):
it overlooked many of its problematic issues of colonialism and
race was definitely a very romantic sized view of it
that Linda was portraying to her kids, and all of
this fueled audrey sense of separateness and identity. So the
Lord's started a family, and Frederick started studying real estate
in night school, eventually starting his own reasonably successful real

(07:17):
estate business. The first of Audrey's two older sisters was
born in ninety nine and the second in nineteen thirty one.
Audrey herself was born Audrey with a Why It's later
spelled with no why but Audrey Geraldine Lord on February eighteenth,
thirty four, and as the baby of the family, Audrey
naturally got a lot of attention. She also had a

(07:38):
number of physical problems. She actually didn't speak until she
was about four years old, and when she did start
to talk, she actually had a stutter. Her eyesight was poor,
and she had to wear corrective shoes. So she was
the baby of the family and was, you know, really
attended to in a lot of ways. Her sisters, who
already had a close relationship to each other, grew resentful

(08:01):
of all the attention that she was getting, both for
being the youngest and because she had other special needs.
So Audrey grew up feeling distant from her sisters and
kind of excluded from this world that the two of
them shared with each other. But she also felt a
degree of distance from her parents as well. Both of
them were quite strict and emotionally pretty reserved, and she

(08:23):
saw from a very early age her mother's own racism.
In Granada, she had lived within a racial hierarchy in
which people with light skin were much more valued than
people with darker skin, and as someone who could pass
for white, Audrey's mother was in a very privileged class
of Granada uh, and she looked down on people who
were darker than she was, even though her husband, Byron,

(08:44):
was in fact darker. This sense of being better also
affected how the lords lived in the United States. African
American music and dance that her parents considered common were
banned from the house, and all of the these elements
together really made Audrey feel like an outsider in her
own home and also in the rest of the outside world.

(09:08):
And combined with that, she was also a bit rebellious
and willful as a child. She would push back against
her parents rules all the time. Uh, you know, the
boundaries they would try to set up for her as
a child, she would buck against and this makes her
later role as an activist constantly challenging social norms pretty unsurprising. Yeah,
the foundation for that was laid very early on in

(09:29):
her life. Her personality was still rebellious and sometimes even
obstinate by the time she got to school. And that's
also when she dropped the letter why from the end
of her first name. That happened during penmanship class. She
just didn't like the way that it looked there, and
so she just took it off and like dropping it
below the line. Perhaps No, Her sense of being an

(09:49):
outsider continued as she grew up, and when she was
about eleven, the family moved to another part of Harlem
that was at the time mostly white, and they were
actually the first black family on their locke and Audrey
was the only black student in her Catholic school and
she was not happy there. She didn't fit in and
she was teased and ridiculed by her peers because of
her race. So she never really had like that sense

(10:11):
of belonging or community anywhere. Yeah, not at that point.
They the kids in her school made fun of her
hair and they told her she smelled bad and it
was just all kinds of things that that people were saying,
we're because she was black, and all of it made
for not a happy experience at all. And eventually, as
a result of the harassment that she was facing at

(10:33):
her school, her parents let her apply to Hunter College
High School, which is a school for academically gifted students.
It still exists today, but at the time it was
an all girls school and Audrey started going there in
While she was still in the minority there in terms
of race, she was much more among peers academically speaking,

(10:54):
she fit in better and she was able to begin
building a community of female friends around her, and being
part of this female community was something that would continue
to be important to Audrey for the rest of her life.
Audrey had been reading and reciting poems since she was
really really young, and sometimes she would even communicate in poems.
She would recite a poem that expressed what she was

(11:16):
feeling or thinking rather than using her own words, and
when she was studying at Hunter, she also started writing
more of her own poetry and sharing that work with
other girls, which is another thing that became a lifelong
theme with her, and she became part of a tight
knit group of students that came to be known as
the Branded. Among other things, they met before school to

(11:37):
read their poems to one another, and Audrey was the
only black student in the group. Most of her black
friends still lived in Harlem and they went to other schools.
She also had her first poem published while she was
at Hunter. She had learned about sonnets by reading the
work of Edna st. Vincent Malay, which she loved and
we love so that's very exciting um. She wrote and

(12:01):
submitted a love sonnet to the school literary magazine, and
the magazine rejected it. The note that came back said
that she should not aspire to being a centualist, and
Audrey's interpretation was that the faculty advisor didn't like what
she had said in the poem, not that the poem
itself wasn't good. So she sent it to seventeen magazine,
which accepted and published it in it paid her for it,

(12:25):
so she got paid in addition to the fact that
she had been published before she even got out of
high school. She started to question her sexual orientation while
it Hunter. Also she started to have crushes on female
classmates and teachers. She also had a close and physical
but not sexual relationship with a girl named Genevieve, who

(12:45):
tragically committed suicide in nineteen fifty when she was just
just shy of sixteen years old. After Genevieve's death, Audrey
was really grief, grief stricken and felt horribly guilty about
the whole thing, really really sort of soul searching about
whether there was something she could have done to prevent
it from happening. And in her later teens, she dated

(13:08):
both men and women, and all of the people that
she dated were white. She mostly kept her romantic relationships
with girls a secret, but her parents knew that she
was dating white boys and they were not happy about it.
When she was seventeen, she started dating a white boy
named Jerry Levine, and this was a huge source of
tension between Audrey and her family. Audrey graduated from high

(13:32):
school in ninette and she had wanted to go to
Sarah Lawrence College, but her parents couldn't afford it. Sarah
Lawrence is and wasn't very expensive, and her father had
had a series of heart attacks and was no longer
in good health. But Audrey felt like that they could
have made it work if they had wanted to, and
they were deliberately not supporting her education. This plus years

(13:55):
of strained family relationships combined made her really really who
you want to get out of her parents house, and
so she decided to get a job and put herself
through Hunter College, the college that was affiliated with her
high school for gifted students. She got a night shift
job as a nurse's aid at a hospital, just no
easy job, so she really wanted out. Uh. She moved

(14:18):
out of her parents home after a huge argument with
her sister, during which her mother had threatened to call
the police, and Audrey viewed this as burning her bridges
and just starting a new part of her life on
her own. And I think it's worked out to be
more difficult than she was expecting it to be. She
really struggled as she started college because the break with
her family had wound up being harder on her than

(14:40):
she expected. Her father's seriously ill health was also a
big strain to her. Her relationship with Jerry, which she'd
always felt kind of conflicted over, started to unravel. She
finally lost her job one day after not showing up
for work, and her father had another heart attack. All
the things together prompted her to go into therapy, and

(15:02):
she would be in therapy at various points for most
of the rest of her life. And then in nine two,
right before she turned eighteen, Audrey discovered that she was
pregnant and she underwent an illegal abortion. Audrey found herself
less at home at Hunter College than she had been
at Hunter High School. You know, at the high school,
it was in an all girls community. Uh, that is

(15:25):
not the case with the college. She didn't feel like
she had the close knit community of support that she
had had and enjoyed having in high school. She started
going back and forth to Harlem to attend meetings of
the Harlem Writers Guild, and in the fall she dropped
out of Hunter entirely and moved to Connecticut. She worked
for a little while at an electronics company, which was
a job that exposed her to both dangerous chemicals and radiation,

(15:49):
before deciding to travel to Mexico. A friend's fiancee, who
was a painter, had lived there, and hearing the stories
about it prompted her to want to go there herself.
So she arrived at Mexico at the age of twenty,
but at first she lived in hotels in Mexico City,
and she enrolled in classes at the National University of Mexico.

(16:09):
Then she started to meet friends of friends whose names
had been given to her before she left New York,
and one of these was Freedom Matthews, known as Freddie,
who lived in Cuernavaca, home to a lot of creative expatriates.
Audrey moved there after a visit and commuted back and
forth to class. I'm not sure how long this drive
would have taken at the time. Google Maps thinks it's

(16:29):
more than an hour today. So she was dedicated to
the idea of both being in this community and in school.
Her time in Mexico really set the stage for a
lot of her later life. She wrote really prolifically and
kind of stretched her ability as a writer. She also
became part of a community of women and had her

(16:51):
first really public relationship with another woman. Her name was
Edora Garrett, and she was a journalist who was twenty
seven years older than Audrey was. Audrey had been in
relationships with women before, but it was in Mexico that
she really began to think of herself as a lesbian.
Eudora was also the first woman that Audrey had ever
met who had had a mastectomy after a breast cancer,

(17:12):
and she chose not to wear a breast pro prosthesis,
which was a choice that Audrey would also make in
her own life later on, so it was likely influential,
even though at the time she probably wasn't thinking of
it as such. So do you want to take a
moment to have a word from our sponsor? Yes, I do,
and now let's get back to our discussion of Audrey Lord.

(17:33):
Audrey went back to the United States and the next
year went back to Hunter College. Back in the States,
she went through the nineteen fifties and a pretty closeted life.
She did become part of the lesbian bar scene and
continuing this theme of being an outsider, most of the
bars were owned by white people and had a predominantly
white clientele, so she didn't really she's kind of an

(17:56):
outsider in that context. She also didn't fit exclusively into
either a butch or fem identity, which the bar scene
at the time viewed people who didn't go into one
of those buckets with a lot of suspicion and derision.
In uh late nineteen fifty seven or early Audrey began
seeing a therapist due to loneliness, uh poor sleeping, and

(18:19):
feeling frustrated with her own emotional barriers. Her therapist died
unexpectedly though, in March of ninety eight, just before the
anniversary of Audrey's friend Genevieve's death, and she became deeply
depressed and sought further therapy for a depression that she
herself described as nearly suicidal. Audrey was able to finish school, though,

(18:40):
and in nineteen fifty nine she got a be a
from Hunter College and entered Columbia University. She got a
Master of Library Science at Columbia in nineteen sixty one,
and she went on to become a librarian. She became
the only black person working as a professional in the
Mountain Vernon Public Library in New York, and with this job,
she was able to move into her an apartment and

(19:00):
have a secure professional and financial life, and this gave
her a lot of freedom, which she had always been craving,
and she had a number of intense emotional and physical relationships.
She developed a social circle of other writers and activists,
and her life at this point was sort of a
cycle of late nights with friends and partners, followed by
caffeine and amphetamines the next day to stay awake. Uh.

(19:23):
She continued her amphetamine use until she became pregnant with
her first child, so it really did become quite habitual. Yeah,
And she was also becoming an increasingly visible presence in
the feminist community. Second wave feminism hadn't really gotten its
start quite yet. That was still to come a little
bit later, but there were still many feminist thinkers and

(19:44):
writers and speakers, and she became more and more prevalent one.
Although this term had not been coined yet and it
wouldn't be coined for another thirty years. Her thoughts on
feminism were really deeply rooted in the content the concept
of intersectionality, which is the interlocking and overlapping patterns of
discrimination based on race, gender, class, sexual orientation, all sorts

(20:10):
of other facets of a person's identity. Um Intersectionality is
a theme that's come to the forefront of the feminist
movement again recently. You can listen to our colleagues on
Stuff Mom Never Told You talk about it, and the
recent episode is Solidarity for White Women, which also talks
about Audrey Lord. Uh. So that is the end of

(20:30):
part one on Audrey Lord, and then the next episode
we're going to talk about how her feminist and political
views led her to becoming a wife and mother and
her career as a teacher and a poet that followed that.
So there's more to come on Audrey Lord. Uh, do
you have a listener mail for us to have listener
mail fire away? I have two pieces of listener mail.

(20:52):
They are both about our Mendez Versus Westminster podcast. The
first one is from Colleen, and Colleen says, Hi, Tracy
and Holly, I just finish listening to your podcast on
Mendes Versus Westminster, and I really enjoyed it. I grew
up in southern California and never really learned about that
part of California's history. You mentioned the schools for the
Mexican American children didn't have cafeterias, and while I can't

(21:13):
speak for that time, today it's very common for kids
to eat outside at picnic tables at all schools, public
and private, although not near the smell of manure. I
went to three different private schools from kindergarten through high school,
and none of them had cafeterias. It very rarely rains
and is generally moderate temperatures. A few days a year
it did rain, we had to eat in the classrooms

(21:33):
and hallways. I didn't realize this was unusual until recently
when I moved to a colder and rainier climate. Thank
you so much for all of the interesting podcasts. Keep
up the good work, Calleen. We got a couple of
notes about the presence of cafeterias. Yeah, so thank you
for sending that. I had no idea. Yeah, I mean,
I think we both grew up in areas that would

(21:55):
have needed them. Yes, well, like I think my parents generation,
often schools were close enough to people's homes that there
were schools or didn't have cafeterias because kids would walk
home and happens at home. Um, not everywhere, but some places.
I think that's less common today, uh than before. But yes,

(22:16):
thank you for that. I have another one following that
short clarification, and this is from Emily. Emily says, Hi,
Holly and Tracy. I enjoyed learning about Mendez versus Westminster.
I grew up in Orange County, and I never knew
that those events ever happened. It was darkly funny to
me that the Mendez family got the asparagus farm from

(22:37):
a family that was suffering because of another frequently glossed
over part of California history, Japanese interment camps. I found
that to be also kind of yeah to go on.
There is so much racial tension that still goes on
in southern California and white communities, Latinos are seen as gardeners,
day laborers, nanny's and house cleaners. If a white suburb

(23:00):
night has some intense yard work to do on the weekend,
he might say, I don't think I can do this
on my own. I think I'm going to go buy
the home depot and pick up some Mexicans to help me.
There will be Latino day laborers hanging around the parking
lot of home depot so they can make some cash.
I just don't know what to make of that situation.
They're illegal immigration issues that go into that, a lack
of long term employment for those men, and then the

(23:21):
attitude of going to home depot to pick up some
people that are now commodities like bags of fertilizer, except
more helpful. I just wish everybody would have the equal
opportunity to be successful and respected. Anybody that says the
US is a post racial society is deluded. I wish
we could learn more about California's transformation from being part
of Mexico to a state in the United States. It

(23:44):
is not difficult to be reminded that Los Angeles is
ex Mexico, but in school, we're never taught about that
legacy in detail. I don't want it but little how
important the civil rights movement in the South was. But
the students in Orange County it's three thousand miles away
and fifty years ago. I've learned about our local history too,
so we can be since of up to all of
the issues that are still with us today. You guys
are awesome. Thank you, Emily. I would like to say

(24:06):
that southern California is not the only place where day
labors exist as a as a commodity. Yeah, they're still
pretty common here as well, and I know in other places.
So I couldn't speak holistically for the entire country, but
I know in Georgia, Florida, and even northern climbs, I

(24:31):
have seen or heard of these the same situation happening. Right.
I lived down the street from a home depot used
to so yeah, I agree that there is a giant
confluence of ethnicity and lack of economic opportunity and law

(24:53):
all coming together uh and would probably be material for
many more of casts could be We will see If
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