The Universal Language of Pain

The night I met Ralph Ellison and the solidarity of invisibility

I met Ralph Ellison once at a party at Christopher Cerf’s brownstone. The exact day was Oct. 27, 1992, at a party for the redesign of the Modern Library collection. This is not a brag at all. It’s more of a reality that I had a lot of great opportunities I barely remember and was too young to understand the significance of at the time.

I hadn’t been in New York very long, and this was the first of many author parties my bookstore boss, Ed, dragged me (happily) along. I was more excited to meet William Styron because we went to the same high school, so all night, as he got more and more intoxicated, every time he saw me, he would scream SEAHORSE, our high school’s mascot. I was aware of Ellison’s book The Invisible Man as a classic. Still, I had not read it, and I certainly didn’t understand the cultural significance of meeting one of the greatest American authors of all time two years before his death.

Lots of opportunities got overlooked that night due to what was arrested development and the misunderstanding that open doors happen all the time. Christopher Cerf gave me his card and said to call him about a job at Sesame Street. I promptly lost it. Eudora Welty was there. At the time, I didn’t know who she was, so I barely noticed. I was probably the only woman under 40 there, getting loads of attention, but my self-esteem was so low I had no idea how to react and certainly no idea how to make that work to my advantage. Just off the boat. Naive. Innocent. Whatever you call it, I was in over my head with no idea of anything. How pretty I was. How smart I was. How alive I was. How opportunities like these don’t come along forever.

This night was one of many that I did not value or understand my own worth.

Walking around campus now, these girls seem to be in another world compared to where I lived at that age. Most seem comfortable with their bodies. Even if they are secretly at odds with themselves, the ability to wear short shorts and midriff tops no matter what size exudes a self-confidence that I’ve lacked, be it 15 or 50. Having grown up in a small town where my sisters and I were often looked at as weirdos did such a number on me that I still cringe to go there for fear of some toxic Southern male put down disguised as a compliment. (Southern men are so good at this, aren’t they?) Therapists the world over make billions of dollars a year trying to pinpoint the exact moment when people got so broken that they lost sense of their value. If my life was a satellite image from space, those points would light up the map like Europe at night.

The first part of my life was spent using those broken stories as cocktail fodder, a way to get attention. My mother was the best at this. Her tales of woe were so legendary that the example was too intoxicating not to impersonate. The stories were hilarious. Empathetic. Relatable. A master storyteller, she helped so many people at their lowest points feel like they were not alone. She empowered my sisters and me to cling to our heartbreak and protect it at all costs. Use it for good. Pontificating pain could absorb all the heartache around us until we were so full of the sadness of others that we didn’t have to see what ours was.

Suffocating.

The second part of my life has been inching away from those stories. Finding myself and not relying exclusively on childhood trauma to find solidarity. This meant that during the later part of my mother’s life, I had to pull away from her. In ways I regret now, but at the time, it was the only way I knew how to preserve my emotional bandwidth. I needed it for other things. Like raising a son. Having a job. Loving another person. Hearing my own voice.

I am sure there were times when my mother thought I was a bitch, but in truth, I was putting up boundaries, something all of us should have done a long time ago. I wish she would have lived long enough for me to figure out how to have boundaries and still see the people I love and appreciate them for what they are.

Just as broken as me.

At 52, I’m reading Invisible Man for the first time in class. Ralph Ellison lost a father at a young age. He lived through poverty. Struggled to write another novel after the enormous success of his first. If I could go back to that night, standing in front of that man and shaking his hand again, there are so many things I would say to him about the universal language of pain. Anger. His fallow period when disappointment and ego took up too much room for creativity to blossom. There is a lot in his personal experience that mirrors my own. I wasn’t born in the 1910s. I am not a great American writer. I am not a Black person living in America in the 1950s and 60s, but I certainly know what it’s like to feel invisible, even when I wasn’t.

We all want to feel seen, don’t we?

I’d probably just give him a hug.