Fragile Yet Eternal: How Audre Lorde Continues to Inspire

Signs of water wear creep at the edges. Dustings of mold find their own stability and shape. I touch them carefully, these copies of Audre Lorde’s books that survived the hurricanes, shipped from St. Croix into my hands. Audre’s own copies of the books she wrote. These are treasures. The guidebooks say I should wipe them with denatured alcohol, but first I breathe them in.

I sit in a clinically clean temporary office in Minnesota, but my tongue remembers how salt air in the Caribbean rots the engines out of new cars. My skin remembers how the sun sometimes takes as much as it gives. I spread the books out across my office floor gingerly, so as not to disturb the microorganic skin cells and sand particles that made it through the shipping process. I long for a microscope to find the fingerprints, the pressure and release, the evidence of survival.

Instead, I choose a high-contrast filter and send Dr. Gloria Joseph a selfie of me lying on the floor with the books surrounding my head. I’m crowned for a moment by this slightly distressed rainbow: the threadbare maroon cloth of a once-soaked hardback Chosen Poems, Old and New; the bold red of the second edition of Zami, faded across the spine; the blood words of Our Dead Behind Us over the black-and-white image of three elder Amazon warriors; Coal, silver like the moon through soot; the washed-out yellow of the first German translation of A Burst of Light that must have been sitting in a window, and the blue clouds of the American edition of the same book; the black of H.U.G.O. (Hell Under God’s Orders), flecked with a light-show spiral of dashes; the beige of an uncorrected proof of Undersong that has known both floodwater and sun; the creased sky blue—or is that Caribbean sea blue?—of Sister Outsider; the gray scale of three copies of Cables to Rage, with Audre’s face on the cover, folded into staples now sienna with rust. From the best angle my wrist can manage, it looks like Audre is looking back at me, skeptical in triplicate through her black thick-framed glasses.

“How did you do it?” I whisper, reluctant to get up off the floor. “How did you survive?”

*

Inside the front cover of each book Dr. Gloria Joseph wrote

April 2018

To Alexis
In Memory of Audre

and signed her own name. And so that message becomes part of the matter of these particular copies of these particular books. A clue that I might have something to do with their renewal, their next life.

If not for the date in identical pen, I might have wondered if these books were once meant for a different Alexis—Alexis De Veaux, Gloria Joseph’s former student, my mentor, and Lorde’s first biographer. Who am I to help these books return to themselves? I thought. I sent the picture and a promise to steward these books along with other artifacts Doc Joseph mailed over the years so that future generations could hold the fragile and eternal life of Audre Lorde.

*

By the time Gloria Joseph sent me this package in 2018, the books had collectively been through more than one storm. In September 2011, when I arrived from the airport in St. Croix to live and work in the home where Audre wrote her last books and took her last breaths, Doc Joseph and Helga Emde rushed around barricading their windows for yet another hurricane. None of the storms between 1989 and 2011 were as powerful as Hugo, but like our bodies, books respond to changes in pressure, humid air. They swell, exhale, and dry again. Become more textured versions of themselves.

I don’t know what the house looked like seven years later when, in her process of moving out, Doc Joseph decided to mail me these books. I do know that others who have visited the house since say it is in disarray, with scattered items left behind. I consider it a miracle that at almost ninety years old, struggling with moving out of a house we all hoped would become a museum-shrine to our Lorde, Doc Joseph thought to post me these creased, folded, annotated books. And then, when they were returned to her due to some shipping error, she put the box inside another box and mailed it again.

Doc Joseph never corrected the people in the streets of St. Croix who assumed I was her granddaughter. She just stood her full six feet tall and laughed out loud. She didn’t correct the people in St. Croix who assumed that Audre was her sister and not her lover. When she got my selfie, Doc Joseph emailed back quickly. “Receiving your email this morning brought joy to my soul, body and psyche.” A few months later, Doc Joseph knocked on the door of death, and then miraculously recovered after we all said goodbye. A year later, she departed for good, at the age of ninety-one. During hurricane season.

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Excerpted from Survival Is a Promise: The Eternal Life of Audre Lorde by Alexis Pauline Gumbs. Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Copyright © 2024 by Alexis Pauline Gumbs. All rights reserved.