Boundaries (13 page)

But courage does not warm the heart of a child; love does. It is the courage to love that should have been the badge of courage for the old school, the courage to break down walls no matter how constructed, no matter
why
constructed. It is the courage to reach beyond the self, to take the risk, to expose your vulnerability for the sake of the ones you love, that should have merited praise.

Paula notices her silence. “She doesn’t want your father to worry,” she says. “Nor you.”

Why can’t she be more sympathetic, more understanding?

Lieben und Arbeiten
. Loving and working. This is Freud’s answer to the question of what is most necessary for the child to grow up to live a happy life.
Lieben
, the more important of the two, according to a decades-long study of hundreds of Harvard graduates.

“My father says she is stoic.”

“Courageous,” Paula says.

The word lingers between them. Seconds pass and then Anna clears her throat. “Mummy will sleep most of the day, so I thought I’d get some work done here, and afterward have lunch with my father.”

“You’re a workaholic, Anna.”

“I have responsibilities.”

“You’re not still worrying about Bess Milford?”

“I’m going to try one more time to persuade Tanya to change the book cover,” Anna says.

“Be careful.”

“You think I shouldn’t?”

“You may be stepping into waters too hot for you.”

Anna bristles. “I’ve been in this business a long time, Paula.”

“I don’t doubt you know your business. There’s no way Windsor would have made you head of Equiano if you weren’t one of the best in the publishing industry—but like I always say to you, we may have the passport, but we are hyphenated citizens. They know the terrain better than we ever possibly could.”

TEN

U
ntil she reminds herself that she does not share Paula’s pessimism, her friend’s warning has made her uneasy. Paula has long decided that the bridge between immigrants and Americans born in America is a wobbly one. You can fall off any time America wants to shake it, she claims. But Anna will not allow Paula’s despair to infect her. She has been in the publishing business for close to ten years. Tanya Foster knows her worth and will not discard her, hyphenated citizen or not.

She began on the ground floor, working her way through the slush pile at Windsor. Manuscripts poured in, sometimes as many as one hundred a month, most of them so poorly written it took only a reading of the first page to pass on them. Yet Anna admired the spunk of these writers. Clearly no agent had taken them on; possibly their work had been rejected by several publishers, but they had not lost hope; they kept on trying. It was virtually a miracle to find a decent manuscript in the bunch. “Like finding a needle in a haystack,” the woman who hired her said. The company had little expectation of discovering a publishable manuscript this way. Literary agents are the front guards for publishing companies. They work on contingency; if a writer does not get a contract for her manuscript, they do not get paid. So editors feel confident that they can rely on them; agents will only take on a client if they believe the manuscript is marketable. Yet the manuscripts kept pouring into Windsor, unsolicited, unheralded by agents. Anna’s job when she worked with the slush pile was simply to adjust the company’s form letter of rejection to the individual writer so it would appear as if an editor had actually read the entire manuscript.

It was finding that needle in the haystack that got Anna noticed. Unlike her coworkers whose maximum was ten pages, Anna sometimes read far more of the manuscripts assigned to her from the slush pile. She had become quite good at giving advice, offering helpful editorial direction to the writers. She felt sympathy for them and wanted to give them some hope. Perhaps another publisher would take a chance on their revised manuscripts.

Then two things happened, one of which could have caused trouble for her had it not been for the second. A writer had taken her letter seriously, revised her manuscript, and sent it to another publisher who released her novel. The novel was a hit. Within the first six months of publication it sold seventy thousand copies. Grateful, the writer sent her a thank you letter, with a copy to Tanya Foster. Tanya was furious. She had not hired Anna to solicit books for her competitor, she said, and probably would have fired Anna had one of the editors not told her that she was reading a manuscript Anna recommended to her from the slush pile. It had promise, she said. In fact, the novel had so much promise it sold out its first printing within a month.

Anna’s efforts did not go unrewarded. She was hired full-time as an assistant to the editor and it didn’t take long before she was promoted to editor. When other publishers decided to go through the door Terry McMillan had opened with her national best seller
Waiting to Exhale
, Windsor created Equiano, an imprint for books by writers of color, and Tanya Foster appointed Anna to head the new company. Terry had proven there was a market for books by black writers. Black women had bought her novel in the hundreds of thousands. Windsor believed that with Equiano it would create a gold mine.

Within a short time books by black writers became a genre. There was literature and then there was black literature. Literature encompassed different genres: romance, tragedy, melodrama, comedy, satire, epic, and so on. Black literature was any literature written by a black writer, the expectation being that it would have relevance only to black readers. Bookstores and, unfortunately, too many libraries organized themselves according to this new genre under the pretext of accessibility, that much misused word. There was fiction separated by genre—romance, mystery, etc.—and then there was fiction by black writers under the caption
Black Literature
.

Curiously, when white writers wrote about the experiences of blacks, or when their main characters were black, there didn’t seem to be any need for accessibility; their fiction could be found in the stacks for general fiction, alphabetized by their surnames. Academia followed suit. There was
Nineteenth-Century American Literature
and then there was
Nineteenth-Century African American Literature
, as if African Americans were not also Americans. There was an exegesis on Milton under the category of
Seventeenth-Century British
Literature
, and then, in stacks with the heading
Black Studies,
was an exegesis on Milton written by a black man.

The first black writer that Anna published refused to have her photograph on the jacket cover. She is a writer, not a black writer, she said. She writes novels, not black novels. She wants her novels to be read by any reader, not exclusively by black readers. Bess Milford’s argument to Anna is the same. She wants a jacket cover for her novel that reflects the subject and theme of her novel. The people she writes about are human beings. As far as she knows, she shouts out at Anna, black people are human beings, white people are human beings, and so the novel she has written will have meaning for black readers
and
white readers. But the jacket Equiano has decided upon for Bess Milford’s novel is for the kind of novel the sales force at Windsor assumes a black writer writes and which a black reader will want to read; it is a novel whose genre is
Black
Literature
.

Anna has promised Bess Milford that she’ll try, so she will e-mail Tanya Foster again. Perhaps it is not too late to persuade her to redo the cover for the novel. She will not talk about its literary merit, about the importance of publishing books by black writers that reflect the universality of the human condition regardless of differences in skin color, culture, class, age. If there is hope for the world, Anna believes, it is in our ability to see ourselves in others, in persons who do not look like us, do not talk like us, do not live like us, but who in every essential way are exactly like us. People who desire the same things all people want: above all to survive, above all to be happy, to love and be loved; who fear the same things: above all their mortality, the end of a knowable life; who hope for and dream of the same things: above all justice, for many an afterlife where good is rewarded and evil punished.

You cannot hate the person who mirrors your hopes, fears, and dreams, Anna tells Paula. If hate is what you need, if power is what you desire, you must invent lies; you must create blindfolds that will block your sight, that will prevent you from seeing yourself in the person you hate, that will blind you to similarities.

Paula agrees. In a utopian world we would live in harmony, she says, but here, in the real world, we are competitive; we crave power. We need others under our feet so we can stand tall above them. She returns to her disillusionment over the hope she once had of remaking herself in America. “Americans born here need to flex their muscles over immigrants. It makes them feel powerful.”

“All Americans were immigrants at one time,” Anna reminds her. “Except, of course, for the aboriginal American Indians and the Africans brought here in chains.”

“The oppressed are sometimes the most rabid of oppressors,” Paula responds. “They want their turn too. Watch your step. You are an immigrant; you are disposable. Don’t go overboard fighting for Bess Milford.”

But Anna wants Equiano to tell the truth. She will not deny that novels like Raine’s and Benton’s reflect reality, but they do so only partially. They tell convenient truths. They perpetuate stereotypes, myths that justify the cravings of the economically and socially privileged for power over the poor, over the disadvantaged. She will choose her words carefully when she e-mails Tanya. She will speak her language, use terms that will be meaningful to her. She will speak about the bottom line. She will argue that the present cover will not be good for sales.

She has been careful not to give the slightest indication in her e-mail that she suspects Tanya has not read the novel. Tanya has said she loves the novel, and though it could be implied she has read it, Anna has no evidence of this. “I trust your judgment,” Tanya said, when she accepted Anna’s recommendation months ago to purchase the novel for Equiano. Since then she has offered no comment other than her endorsement for the jacket cover. It is likely all Tanya has read is the synopsis and concluded that this time Milford has added some spice to her novel to make it more marketable. And wasn’t that what she intended? Anna berates herself bitterly. Wasn’t that the effect she wanted when she e-mailed the synopsis along with the entire edited manuscript? She had highlighted the salacious parts of the novel, the sex scenes, particularly the one where the man makes love to his mistress in the tight confines of a bathroom stall. So isn’t she just as guilty as the guys in the art department?
Man trying to get away with
keeping the wife satisfied at home and getting it on with the girlfriend.
Are the means justified by her goal to get more marketing dollars for Bess Milford’s novel? Well, the plan backfired and here she is at the mercy of the salespeople who, she is certain, have not read the novel, who rarely read more than the blurbs the editor sends to them. They make decisions on trends they determine from the numbers they gather on what sells in which bookstores, in which areas. They are not readers, most of them. They are businessmen, businesswomen. They would just as well sell a pharmaceutical as they would sell a novel. But Anna cannot let them have the upper hand here, not for this novel.