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PARTISAN REVIEW
showing only minimal wrinkles, ample steel-gray hair neatly if rigidly coiffed
in a modified beehive hairdo left over from the sixties. She shakes her fist at
the camera, protesting the arrest of the Italian-American youths in the
neighborhood and the incursion of more blacks into the neighborhood,
protesting the shooting. I look a little nervously at my mother (the parent I
resemble), but she has not even noticed the woman and stares impassively at
the television.
What has Bensonhurst to do with what I teach today and write? Why
did I need to write about this killing in Bensonhurst, but not in the manner of
a news account or a statistical sociological analysis? Within days of hearing
the news, I began to plan this essay, to tell the world what I knew, even
though I was aware that I could publish the piece only some place my par–
ents or their neighbors would never see or hear about it. I sometimes think
that I looked around from my baby carriage and decided that someday, the
sooner the better, I would get out of Bensonhurst. Now, much to my sur–
prise, Bensonhurst - the antipodes of the intellectual life I sought, the least
interesting of places - had become a respectable intellectual topic. People
would be willing to hear about Bensonhurst - and
all
by the dubious virtue of
a racial killing in the streets.
The story as I would have to tell it would be to some extent a class
narrative: about the difference between working class and upper middle
class, dependence and a profession, Bensonhurst and a posh suburb. But I
need to make it clear that I do not imagine myself as writing from a position
of enormous self-satisfaction, or even enormous distance. You can take the
girl out of Bensonhurst (that much is clear); but you may not be able to take
Bensonhurst out of the girl. And upward mobility is not the essence of the
story, though it is an important marker and symbol.
In Durham today, I live in a twelve-room house, surrounded by an
acre of trees. When I sit on my back deck, on summer evenings, no houses
are visible through the trees. I have a guaranteed income, teaching English at
an excellent university, removed by my years of education from the funda–
mental economic and social conditions of Bensonhurst. The one time my
mother ever expressed pleasure at my work was when I got tenure, what
my father still calls, with no irony intended, "ten years." "What does that
mean?" my mother asked when she heard the news. Then she reached back
into her experience as a garment worker, subject to periodic lay-offs. "Does
it mean they can't fire you just for nothing and can't lay you off?" When I
said that was exactly what it means, she said, "Very good. Congratulations.
That's
wonderful."
I was free from the
padrones,
from the network of petty
anxieties that had formed, in large part, her very existence. Of course, I
wasn't really free of petty anxieties: would my salary increase keep pace
