"Nevertheless, She Persisted"
About a "trunk story" lost by two editors, its eventual publication, and what I have recovered and healed from ...
I wonder if there are any guys out there who remember a time when they came home, talking excitedly about a promotion at work, and their partner quietly listened, then hugged and kissed them and told them how proud they were. Or, if they remember the time they talked about a new project they wanted to try, and their partner encouraged them, telling them they had just what it takes.
Or, maybe, thinking back to school, thinking about a time they were furious at getting a “C” on a paper they knew was an “A” just because the teacher disagreed with them, and their mom said, “I know you did an A paper. I saw how hard you worked. You are a very good writer.”
“You look so good this morning,” I just told Bruce. “I’m so glad you’re feeling better. Would you like to do something nice later on?” He is scheduled for surgery next week and I hope and pray that the operation will help him and at last, he can recover.
For the past year, I have been getting up, usually at 5:00 a.m., to do any form of work I can to pay bills. It’s hard, but it feels pretty much the same as when I did it when my daughter was young and I wanted to “be a professional writer.”
The Book View Cafe anthology Nevertheless, She Persisted was inspired by the symbolic act of a guy I refer to as “old turtle man” (no offense to turtles, animals I adore) saying that Sen. Elizabeth Warren should shut up and get off the Senate floor while making a speech protesting the nomination of another guy I think of as “mean little wizened pickle man.”
I debated whether or not to consider participating in the book because this 2016 election season made things much clearer to me. I could never have been part of upper middle class white society. I must have been out of my skull to think I could “be a science fiction writer,” exclusively the province of upper middle class white males and females with family pedigrees and Ph.Ds.
I have struggled so hard — and only been “successful” while telling others’ stories their way — never my own.
I was an extra baby. My mom died, my dad couldn’t take care of me, and the rest of my family was so terrified of my grandmother there was no chance I was ever going to grow up in a relatively normal upper middle class household. I was doomed from the start.
I had to do everything on my own. There was no one in my family going to help me get a job. I managed to get a 4-year college scholarship on my own and attend Scripps College where my first-year suitemate left every weekend to go out on the yacht at Newport Harbor with Daddy.
I think sometimes of the bright Sunday morning I dragged myself back to my dorm room and sat in the shower until the water ran cold, scrubbing my bruised and burned skin raw. I wanted to die. I remember Darcell’s kind face and gentle hands helping me. Turning the water off, lifting me up.
She went to the campus police with me. She went with me to the real police. My best friend had gotten married and moved out of our suite. The other girl was a selfish stranger.
All I had was Darcell. She was one of a handful of African-American students and she coped with kidney disease and dozens of medications and dialysis and still got straight A’s.
Darcell, whom I looked past while rushing headlong down the hall to some party. Darcell, whom I babbled over, hardly listening to a single word she said. Darcell, whose brothers’ names I didn’t even know, whose mother I had barely spoken to.
Darcell was very dark-skinned, very slender, very kind-eyed, very gentle.
She was brilliant.
She saved my life.
She did not live to be even 25 years old: the kidney disease took her life.
I think sometimes back to Nessie, whose letter my aunt and I found in my grandmother’s papers when we were taking care of her things after she came down with Alzheimer’s.
This was a lady, and I do remember her kind, gentle face, who had helped my father after my mother died when I was a baby. She said she was willing to help my father raise me and she begged my grandmother to give him that chance. The letter was poetic, beautiful, profound.
I’m amazed my grandmother kept it.
She had just driven straight to my parents’ house in Hollywood, scooped me up, and driven me back to Redlands because she wanted that baby, having lost her daughter to cancer.
She had no more regard for Nessie than she did for anyone other than herself.
I knew where Nessie and her husband had lived in South L.A. Sometimes I drove by there, years later, for that brief time I helped build housing there and get jobs.
I thought about her face. I did remember it. And her letter, so kind, so beautiful.
I try very hard not to think about or remember the other things. With all the tough things I’ve experienced in my adult life, none compares to one of the “bad days” in the house I grew up in. Physical abuse is horrible. Psychological abuse creates much longer-lasting scars.
I write because the first woman who treated me like a caring mother treats a child was Nessie, and for many years, Nessie was the only one to do so. People I loved, whom I thought were “friends” in college who were completely absent for me when I was raped (as punishment for winning the college writing prize two years in a row). The girl I disregarded, who wasn’t popular and always out partying like me, because she struggled with a serious illness — she was the one who was there for me. Darcell. Before that day, I hadn’t treated Darcell well. I never asked how she was. I never noticed how much pain she was in, yet always cheerful, always working hard.
After? Yes, I did notice. Yes, I did remember. But she reached out to me first. She showed a humanity I probably cannot yet muster and perhaps never will.
No man can shut me up the way I was silenced in my home. No man can make me feel as small, worthless, ugly and horrible as I was made to feel. No man can depersonalize and dehumanize me as I was. For years.
Sometimes I mention to Bruce, “My grandmother appreciated when I came to cook for her. She was even proud when I sold a few stories.” These tiny shreds mean so much to me.
That I am even sitting here, alive, and typing this, is my form of “Persistence.”
Anyone who has grown up in an abusive home knows that we prefer any and all other environments, from school to athletics to work. Anything to get away.
So, the story I wrote that’s in Nevertheless, She Persisted is called “Digger Lady” and it is very much “about all that.”
It is dedicated to and inspired by Ruth “Dee” Simpson, who was the archaeologist at the San Bernardino County Museum for decades. Dee was one of the very few female archaeologists to compete at the top level.
I knew and know her, because I was the “Intern” at the San Bernardino County Museum during the summer and holidays after I graduated from high school and my first year of college. It is a job I created myself. There was no other “intern” before. I walked in, and asked for the job and showed the museum’s founder Dr. Smith how I could be paid only a small amount by the museum funds, and the rest of my pay through work-study funds.
I don’t know how much of that initiative was necessity to get myself out of the house and around other non-abusive people, and how much of it was actual “initiative.”
This job was unbelievable experience and ideal for a student interested in science and the arts.
I was seventeen years old and my part-time “other” job was floor modeling for the local department store. The male scientists at the museum, even courtly, brilliant Dr. Smith, were pretty patient with me and always sought to spend extra time.
I can still picture Dee glaring out of her office at Gene the Bird Man (ornithologist) showing me how to stuff bird specimens and how to operate the dehydrating machine for small reptiles and rodents.
No one there would have really known me. I didn’t even know myself. I was the image of a polite, intelligent blonde girl. Inside, such whirling thoughts.
But I listened. I heard. I was responsible to clean and repair the figure of Dr. Louis Leakey in the main exhibit hall. Dee’s main project was the “Early Man” dig in the Mojave desert near the touristy ghost town of Calico. She, and her sponsor Leakey, believed they had discovered stone tools in the desert showing early man had been in North America as long as 100,000 years ago.
I heard people mocking this contention. I read articles talking about how stupid it was. Even then, I had a vague sense there was something wrong, that people were against Dee because she was a female, not even considering her work on its merits or the facts.
Dee was so brusque and no-nonsense. I wondered if that were really her personality or she had to be that way because of the work she did. I asked if I could go on one of the digs. Since I had to take the bus, that was out — it didn’t run early enough. Then she softened and gave me a box of rat middens to catalog.
When I wrote my first published sci-fi story, “Johnny Punkinhead,” I was inspired by my much-later experiences working with poor and homeless families at Family Service Assn. in my hometown of Redlands, my second “real job” after college. I was so inculcated in our culture that I made the main character, whose experiences and thoughts were based on my own, into an upper middle-class male psychologist, Dr. Hedrick Arlan.
If I had not made that choice, but rather written unselfconsciously about a less-educated, younger, poorer female in the same situation, with “Jenny Punkinhead” as the little pumpkin-headed child whose family has abandoned him . . .
I know for a fact the story wouldn’t have been in the June 1996 “New Writers” issue of the Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction with the Nazi clown on the cover painted by my now-friend Kent Bash.
I am a Nebula Award nominated writer who is the only female author to have two cover stories of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction in one year.
And the story now titled “Digger Lady” which is inspired by the real-life work and adversities faced by Ruth “Dee” Simpson, a major female archaeologist and pioneer in the field —
Was one of my two “lost masterpieces.” The other one is called “It Came to South Central.” That one was about a black female physician’s assistant who finds an alien artifact that heals people in a vacant lot on the corner of 78th and Broadway in South Los Angeles. It’s REALLY lost.
But I found this two years ago along with its initial editorial rejection letter with 2 pages of revision notes from Gordon Van Gelder. He had sent this back to me shortly before my baby Anthony died in January, 2005. It got packed in a box when I moved. I hadn’t forgotten the story — just didn’t want to or feel interested in working on it. I looked at it again, and the story was actually a sequel to “Mad for the Mints,” a popular story I’d written featuring two really messed-up mint-addicted intergalactic eBay traders and Mad King George. And a talking horse named Phutatorius. And Girard Callard, an impoverished maker of “curiously-strong peppermints.”
I did rewrite the story and did send it to the editor who replaced Van Gelder at the publication. He lost it. Gordon had lost it prior to his editorial letter. That makes two “lost” times at a major publication; no, that is not a usual or “normal” occurrence.
So, unironically, the story of the story in the book is also “persistence.”
The “Digger Lady” in the story, “Vi” Elliott, has discovered evidence of Early Man in the Mojave desert near Calico. She combats the exact problems Dee Simpson experienced. The only difference was, Vi has new friends, including a trailer-dwelling real-life Neanderthal named Tim, and Touchey and Crumb, odd looking alien gentlemen addicted to curiously-strong peppermints, searching for the best new items to sell on intergalactic eBay.
I have repeated dozens of times the truth: I have never sold a story professionally to a major publication with a female protagonist over age 25.
“Vi,” in the story, is well over 70.
As I have written about others countless times, from Percy Julian to Temple Grandin, from learning about Native American writers and perspectives, to Katherine Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan, and Mary Jackson, people who are shut out, erased, and silenced by the dominant culture don’t want to participate because they want to take something away from others. They want to participate because they want to give.
I have grave reservations about our culture and society. I have no easy respect for the dominant narratives no matter who issues them forth. Our problem today is a lack of perception. As I did not “see” Darcell until she saved my life and lifted me up after I was raped, as I did not “see” Nessie until I read her letter so many years later, and as all those people at the museum except Dee (and a six foot tall Chinese lady named Bobbie who taught me to type and be a good office employee) did not “see” me —
I have the same look on my face now as I remember seeing in Dee’s eyes all those years ago. Sad, suspicious, grieving, resigned —
Still proud, unbowed and unbroken.
There may very well have been early humans in Southern California 100,000 years ago. Some day, Dee and her friend Dr. Leakey may be proved right. As to her life and work, she did all of those things so very right, so the proof of early man at Calico, in the end, does not matter.
You can buy the print edition of the book via Amazon, but it is preferable to purchase the eBook via Book View Cafe where almost 100% of the proceeds will go to the authors.