Love, Sorrow, And Rage

6. Love and Other Intimacies

6 Love and Other Intimacies THIS IS THE day 1have a date with Sonia Morales, who well fits the description of a woman "at high risk" for HIV infection, if she isn't already infected.! Most of the time, Sonia walks around in a stoned haze, probably from the street drug she regularly inhales. 1can't find the small, frail woman anywhere around the house, and nobody has seen her since the morning. Nora hasn't seen her either. "It's hard to catch someone who's running," Nora explains, and 1realize it's time to give up the search for Sonia. "If 1was running in the street, you wouldn't be able to catch me either," Nora warns. This day, Nora feels great. She attended the Gay March held in Central Park this weekend. "Everybody was sereneeven the cops," Nora reports, "It reminds me of the old pictures of the civil rights movement, but without the cops spraying water on everybody. There was an amazing amount of people and everybody kept peaceful." Around Woodhouse, though, the talk has mostly been about O. J. Simpson and murder. "Why do so many men do that?" Nora wants to know. Finding many parallels to her own life, Nora finds the whole thing too upsetting to discuss. "I know he killed his wife," she concludes. 105 Copyrighted Material 106 Chapter Six Nora and I organize the cooking group for the day. We plan to boil up some pasta and make a salad. Together we go marketing on Broadway. Nora is in the mood for a lobster sauce, but we can't find any in Key Foods. She settles for clams, and we decide the menu will be spaghetti with clam sauce, garlic bread, sliced tomatoes, onion and avocado, and watermelon for dessert. I've got my eye on a couple ofspecial spots on Broadway where Sonia is known to panhandleKentucky Fried Chicken, Academy Florist, Chemical Bank. Nora brings up a new subject. "You know, I think sometimes society has gotten us in a lot of trouble with labels, that's how I feel. They'da screwed us up," she laughs. Nora finds blind acceptance of social norms difficult. In words and deed, and in how she tells her own story, Nora is always questioning. In her searches for identity, I recall how Nora tries on an array of gender styles: "All the women who go with big-shot guys were dressing in heels, talk smart, outside her lip ... [at] that time my hair was longer, and I wore lipstick, makeup and heels and dresses and pant suits and my minks and my rings .. .. I was [Charlie's] woman, so I was always by his side." Shortly after she fit that description, Nora changed gears and enlisted in the armed forces. Today she's talking about race. "They label us black, but I don't call myself black. I call myself mixed, you know?" Nora takes up the challenge to surrender those "artificial boundaries that divide an unruly world into tidy analytic chambers" (Kleinman, Das,and Lock 1996: xiii). She is the "crack between our categories." Nora goes on. "And they label people 'white,' and I don't know where they got that from. I think they just botched us Copyrighted Material Love and Other Intimacies 107 up. I think society has botched us up with all this stuff. It's caused people a lot of problems with each other." But without "race," how would we know who to exclude and marginalize ? "The fatal coupling of difference and power" is Stuart Hall's description of the core of racism and the work it does in welcoming some while relegating others to the dustbin. Perhaps the ultimate image of the racialized other, blacks in the United States represent that which is to be most feared. Once again, fear is projected onto an-other, arrived there by "all that symbolic and narrative energy and work [that] secures us 'over here' and them 'over there,' fixes each in its appointed species place" (1992: 15-16). To help suppress and control that which is different is good reason to keep the labels; danger must be contained. Nora rejects the label "black" though she embodies it too. "I call myself mixed. I am mixed. My mix is this. My father's great-grandfather was white. Now my father was very fair skinned, very fair skinned, straight black...