Grace Paley is almost as well known for her politics as for her short stories. Indeed, she has said that “the three things in my life have been writing, politics, and family” (Isaacs 123), and that each has, at times, been forced to give way to the others. Many of the critics who admire her work, for example, lament the fact that her political activity has kept her from doing more of it. She disagrees with such an assessment. For her, the two are intimately connected; she has argued that “art, literature, fiction, poetry, whatever it is, makes justice in the world” (Shapiro 45), a belief that is expressed in much of her fiction. One of the most fascinating aspects of many of Paley’s stories, though, is the way in which they create a forum wherein she can question her own real-life activism. In these works she both explores and satirizes her theme of a commitment to others (Antler 16).

This paper was originally presented, in slightly different form, at the Twentieth-Century Literature Conference in Louisville, Kentucky, in February 1993. At that time Judith Arcana’s vitally important text, Grace Paley’s Life Stories: A Literary Biography (Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1993), had not yet appeared, and so Arcana’s insights were not included in the essays’s original version and can only be touched on in passing now. On several occasions in her book, Arcana makes statements very similar to some of the points I am raising in this essay. She writes in the introduction, for example, that “in [Paley’s] most apparently autobiographical work, characters reflect her well-known political stance, including her struggle to be responsible for her own consciousness: what she learns is learned by those characters. Faith is revealed as less than lovable when the erstwhile racist and sexist Zagrowsky ‘tells’” (6). Arcana points out that “Faith in a Tree” and “The Long-Distance Runner” both “reveal extensive development of political consciousness in their author” (115), and her comments on these stories and “Zagrowsky Tells” are quite strong. She also makes some very good observations about Paley’s black characters in stories that don’t feature Faith Darwin (particularly “The Little Girl”) and details the biographical facts of Paley’s involvement with civil rights issues. Anyone interested in Paley should become acquainted with Arcana’s groundbreaking work, much of which supports the position I have taken in this essay.

This self-questioning seems particularly aroused when Paley writes of African Americans. A staunch believer in civil rights, Paley states in the “Introduction” to her recent collection of short pieces, Long Walks and Intimate Talks (1991), that she hopes her work will “by its happiness and sadness, demonstrate against militarists, racists, earth poisoners, women haters, [and] all those destroyers of days” (emphasis added). Indeed, the central characters in Paley’s canon are, in the words of one critic, “self-defined activists faithfully engaged in fighting oppression. Such activism is inclusive; it recognizes shared suffering. … Paley’s characters identify with oppressed groups” (Aarons 25–26). Nevertheless, in some of her fiction Paley seems to acknowledge that she might herself display some racist behaviors. At other times she appears to be asking herself why she, a white woman, should have the right to speak about African-American concerns in the first place. Through the fictional persona of Faith Darwin Asbury, a recurring personality in Paley’s stories, she is able to examine someone very much like herself while at the same time distancing herself from that person’s activities. In this manner she is able to, as Jacqueline Taylor notes, “reveal her good intentions [as well as] her limited awareness” (84). The fact that Paley is aware of her own limited awareness only intensifies her self-consciousness and self-questioning. By examining African-American issues as they arise in Paley’s stories, particularly the stories that feature Faith, we can get a clear understanding of this self-questioning process, the way in which she uses her stories to comment on her political activism.

Faith appears (directly or indirectly) in five of the stories in Paley’s second collection, Enormous Changes at the Last Minute (1974), and issues of race are at least briefly mentioned in all of them. On some occasions, for example, Faith’s friends and acquaintances make negatively stereotyped comments about blacks. In “Distance,” Mrs. Raftery, Faith’s Irish neighbor, explains that “there are different kinds coming into this neighborhood, and I do not mean the colored people alone. I mean people like you and me, religious, clean, many of these have gone rotten” (67). Underlying her statement is the belief that “colored people” are not “people like you and me, religious, [and] clean,” that they are naturally “rotten.” Mrs. Raftery is not a sympathetic character, and Paley certainly intends for the reader to scrutinize such comments carefully. In “Come On, Ye Sons of Art,” Faith’s friend Kitty argues with her boyfriend, Jerry Cook, about moving out of the city. He asks her, “What have your kids got here, everywhere they go, shvartzes, spics and spades,” yet he feels compelled to add, “not that I got a thing against them, but who needs the advance guard” (122). He claims to believe in equal rights, but his profession rings undeniably hollow. Kitty’s response—she “put her finger over his lips. Ssh, she said. I am tolerant and loving” (122)—also seems inadequate, and Jerry undercuts it even more by reminding her how, in a previous time, she had been repulsed by Jewish immigrants. In both of these stories, however briefly, Paley is indeed demonstrating against racism, while at the same time pointing out that it is more subtle and pervasive than we might at first believe.

Faith herself makes similarly ambivalent remarks in the story “Faith in a Tree,” however. She goes out of her way to act according to her political beliefs, but she is not above making herself a martyr for doing so. When her son Richard has an argument with Arnold Lee, the only kid in his class smarter than he is, and Chinese, she explains to him that he should:

use some of these advantages I’ve given you. I could be living in the country, which I love, but I know how hard that is on children—I stay here in this creepy slum. I dwell in soot and slime just so you can meet kids like Arnold Lee and live on this wonderful block with all the Irish and Puerto Ricans, although God knows why there aren’t any Negro children for you to play with. … (84)

In a passage like this all of Faith’s politically proper actions are undercut, for Paley shows us her true feelings and motivations: she is giving up something she would prefer in order to do what she knows is the right thing. As with Jerry Cook’s profession of belief in equality, the reader must question the inconsistencies in Faith’s reasoning. In this way—as Taylor notes with regard to the later story “The Long-Distance Runner”—“Faith’s well-meaning liberalism is challenged” (84).

“Faith in a Tree” is more significant, though, for its depiction of the moment at which Faith decides to become politically committed. As the story opens she is, literally, in a tree—she is with her children playing in the park—and this perspective allows her to look down on the world below and beneath her. In this position she can, as one critic notes,

assume a superior air [and] talk down to her fellow New Yorkers in a sympathetic tone that slightly leans toward condescension. For all her democratic idealism of living in a slum, educating her sons in cultural pluralism, and participating in the PTA, Faith in a tree is only half-committed. (Baba 45)

At the end of the story, however, following a demonstration against the war, Richard himself forces Faith to come down from her perch. He argues with her that she should have been stronger in not allowing the park cop to break up the demonstration, and he writes the demonstrators’ message in huge chalk letters on the blacktop. The story ends with Faith’s comment,

And I think that is exactly when events turned me around, changing my hairdo, my job uptown, my style of living and telling. Then I met women and men in different lines of work, whose minds were made up and directed out of that sexy playground by my children’s heartfelt brains, I thought more and more and every day about the world. (99–100)

She is going to assume a more activist role now—on the ground rather than in a tree—and we sense that she will soon begin to protest more vehemently against injustice, particularly with regard to the war. The ending of this story, like many of Paley’s stories, Victoria Aarons notes, provides us “with hope that manifests itself … in a kind of political resolve in which [Faith] see[s] opportunities for dramatic and willful change” (25), and, moreover, begins to seize them.

Yet even as she sets out on this action it is already being undercut. In the early portion of the story, Faith presents a rather negative portrait of a Mrs. Junius Finn, who is “glad to say a few words” and who, Faith reports, “always is more in charge of word meanings than I am. She is especially in charge of Good and Bad” (85). That is to say, Mrs. Finn is always willing to give out her opinion of what is good or bad as though she were stating fact. Faith seriously questions her authority. By the end of “Faith in a Tree,” however, Faith is on her way to assuming the same kind of authoritarian stance. We should not be surprised, then, when in later stories she comes to question her own authority, particularly when it comes to political issues that contain, in Clara Park’s words, “the ugly ambiguities that did not arise when it was so simply right to oppose the war” (488). These ambiguities arise particularly when it comes to the question of racism. Faith knows prejudice is wrong and wants to demonstrate against it, but, in the collection’s final story, “The Long-Distance Runner,” she is forced to question both her right and her ability to do so.

“The Long-Distance Runner” is plotted in terms of a journey motif, with Faith running back to her past to find a way to run toward the future. She leaves the house one morning and jogs to her old neighborhood, which has now become all black. Her initial encounters in the neighborhood range from jocular to threatening, and she is eventually forced to take refuge in the apartment where she had grown up, now occupied by a Mrs. Luddy, her son Donald, and her three young daughters. Faith ends up staying there for several weeks, after which she returns home having learned, the story concludes, “as though she were still a child[,] what in the world is coming next” (198). Throughout the narrative, however, Faith, herself the student, is constantly intruding into the lives of these black people, offering advice as if she knows, and can teach them, what is right. Every time she offers such a liberal bromide, she is made to see the difficulty inherent in her well-meaning but misguided suggestions. In the early portion of the story, for example, a young girl scout, Cynthia, takes her to her old building and asks her about the previous tenants. When Faith discovers that Mrs. Goreditsky had continued to live there until her recent death, she remarks, “Only two years ago. She was still here! Wasn’t she scared?” Cynthia replies, “So we all. … White ain’t everything” (185). Faith initially declines Cynthia’s offer of an introduction to Mrs. Luddy, claiming that she doesn’t want to see the apartment because her mother has recently died (although her mother, as we know from this and other stories, is alive and well at the Children of Judea nursing home). The lie backfires, as Cynthia becomes quite upset by the thought of the death of her own saintly mother. Faith tries to comfort her by telling her that, if anything happens to her mother, “you could come live with me” (187), but this sign of liberality on Faith’s part only provokes great anger in the child, who does not want to be taken out of her environment. “Stay away from me, honky lady,” she says, and begins to cry out for help. It is in running from the approaching sounds of these helpers, in fact, that Faith knocks at Mrs. Luddy’s door.

Mrs. Luddy takes Faith under her wing, protecting her from the mob and offering shelter. Almost immediately, Faith takes on the role of an older daughter, although she once again can’t help being a little like Mrs. Junius Finn. She feels compelled to offer advice to Mrs. Luddy and Donald, and African Americans in general, but all of her politically charged statements about what should be done are undercut. Upon seeing the urban trash, for example, Faith remarks that “Someone ought to clean that up”; Mrs. Luddy quickly responds, “Who you got in mind? Mrs. Kennedy?” (190). When Donald makes a rather astute, insider’s comment about the black youths on the street corner—“They ain’t got self-respect. They got Afros on their heads, but they don’t know they black in their heads”—Faith’s response, “I thought he ought to learn to be more sympathetic,” is easily seen to be inadequate (191). When she urges Mrs. Luddy to let Donald play on the street, that “he ought to be with kids his age more, I think,” Mrs. Luddy tells her, “Don’t trouble your head about it if you don’t mind” (191). Shortly after this conversation Mrs. Luddy tells Faith that it is time for her to go, that “This ain’t Free Vacation Farm” (195). Her comment “time we was by ourself a little” (195) indicates that Mrs. Luddy “will not allow Faith to play grandmother, for Black cultural ties cannot be impaired” (Kamel 42). Faith realizes that it is time for her to go as well and, although she will miss Mrs. Luddy and Donald, she feels that she is returning to her home wiser than she was when she left. While jogging back to her house she makes a stop at another locale from her earlier life: the playground that was the setting of “Faith in a Tree.” She stops to talk with “a dozen young mothers intelligently handling their little ones,” to tell them that “in fifteen years, you girls will be like me, wrong in everything” (196).

When, towards the end of her “vacation,” Faith finally listens to Mrs. Luddy—who talks to her “gently as one does to a person who is innocent and insane and incorruptible because of stupidity” (192) and tells her the stories that she has been told and raised on by her own mother—Faith comes to see how limited her awareness of black life has been before her sojourn in the ghetto. Initially she thinks that her liberalism, and moreover her Jewishness, would naturally align her with African Americans, but she discovers that she is “naive about … the lives of blacks” and that, outside of her community, she is, in Barbara Eckstein’s words, an “enthusiastic, bungling tourist” (138). When a black youth whom she has complimented for his manner of speech tells her that “we get that from talking,” for example, she responds, “yes my people also had a way of speech” (181). As in Bernard Malamud’s story “Black Is My Favorite Color,” however, in “The Long-Distance Runner,” according to Minako Baba, “neither Faith’s claim to lineage of radicalism or to familiarity with the neighborhood, nor her attempt to demonstrate friendship[,] succeeds with the street blacks, and she is hounded as a suspicious white lady” (46). It is only when she can put her own preconceptions aside and really listen to the black voice of Mrs. Luddy, though, and to the black voices that are contained in Mrs. Luddy’s mother’s stories from the oral tradition, that she can come to understand how she has been wrong in the past and what she must do to correct her behavior in the future. It may be true that her “affectionate identification with Mrs. Luddy and her unwanted assistance in her children’s nurturing and education are sincere,” as one critic would have it, but what she learns is that she has acted with “simpleminded presumption” (Baba 47).

One of the most important things that Faith learns in the story is that, regardless of how she might think of and view herself, she has ingrained racist beliefs that she must now begin to search for and attempt to eradicate. She is forced to admit that she’s afraid to leave the haven of Mrs. Luddy’s apartment because “I’d become fearful. Despite my wide geographical love of mankind, I would be attacked by local fears” (188). She now knows that such geographical love—a belief in equal rights as an abstract principle—is not good enough, unless one puts that love into practice in a necessarily small and local way. As in “Faith in a Tree,” we here witness Faith’s discovery of a new resolve to fight more strongly for justice; she jogs back home a changed person, “now in possession of a more realistic view of the diversity and complexity of the world and the limitations of her own experience and perspective” (Taylor 84). When “The Long-Distance Runner” ends, though, the message is not being properly received. Her sons and her boyfriend cannot understand where she has been or what it has meant to her, both because they don’t have the vision of the future that she now possesses and because she, an outsider, cannot do a very good job of describing or explaining it.

The connection that Faith tried to make between blacks and Jews here in terms of their linguistic innovations is similar to the kind of joking remarks her father makes about black-Jewish relations in several places. In “Faith in the Afternoon,” for instance, he reflects back on his youthful plans

to organize the help. You know the guards, the elevator boys—colored fellows mostly. You notice, they’re coming up in the world. Regardless of hopes, I never expected it in my lifetime. The war, I suppose, did it. Faith, what do you think? The war made Jews Americans and Negroes Jews. Ha ha. What do you think of that for an article? “The Negro: Outside In At Last.” (47)

Faith is not particularly amused and comments that “someone wrote something like that” (47), perhaps referring to (although inverting) Leslie Fiedler’s observation that “the American is becoming an imaginary Jew” while, “at the same time, the Jew whom his Gentile fellow-citizens emulates may himself be in the process of becoming an imaginary Negro” (98). Faith’s father again humorously points to this ethnic conflation in “Dreamer in a Dead Language,” one of the Faith stories in Paley’s third volume, Later the Same Day (1985). Here it is reported that “he had been discussing the slogan ‘Black is Beautiful’ with Chuck Johnson, the gatekeeper,” and stated, “it’s brilliant. … If we could have thought that one up, it would’ve saved a lot of noses, believe me” (16). He points out, appropriately, the two groups’ shared concern about the problems of assimilation in the multicultural environment, the way in which “the dominant culture’s determination of meaning extends even to definitions of what is beautiful, definitions that are easily internalized by muted groups” (Taylor 61). Unlike Faith, however, her father makes his points known in a subtle and humorous way, and he doesn’t feel the need to question his quiet, local gestures on behalf of improved race relations. His method provides an antidote that allows us to see Faith’s self-righteousness in the somewhat darker shades of contrast.

Faith’s self-righteousness comes under particularly pointed attack in “Zagrowsky Tells,” one of Paley’s finest works. Izzy Zagrowsky, the narrator of the tale, is an elderly man who had been a pharmacist in Faith’s neighborhood. At one point, he recalls, she and some friends had accused him of being a racist and had picketed in front of his store. The encounter he wants to tell us of, however, is a much more recent one, which occurred when he had gone to the park to play with his grandson, Emanuel, who is black. As the reader might suspect, Izzy was at first more than a little reluctant to take in his mentally unstable daughter’s illegitimate black son, but he now accepts his situation and looks at it philosophically. “All right,” he says. “A person looks at my Emanuel and says, Hey! he’s not altogether from the white race, what’s going on? I’ll tell you what: life is going on. You have an opinion. I have an opinion. Life don’t have no opinion” (158–59). Although all indications are that Zagrowsky had indeed employed discriminatory practices in his pharmacy, his love for his grandson has changed his attitude entirely. Like Faith’s father, he is now able to joke about the situation, claiming that Emanuel is “a golden present from … Egypt …—he’s from Isaac’s other son, get it?” (166). Zagrowsky is referring to Abraham and his two sons, Isaac and Ishmael, one of the biblical tropes that is often cited as a sign of literal black-Jewish brotherhood. He also notes of the Italian men he meets in the park to play bocce with that “they think the Jews are a little bit colored anyways” (169), and later on he says of Emanuel’s circumcision that “he isn’t the first colored child. They tell me long ago we were mostly dark” (171).

As the story opens, Zagrowsky is telling us, he was sitting in the park minding his own business when he was approached, more nearly accosted, by Faith. She does not see the humor in the situation—Zagrowsky’s first description of her is as “a woman minus a smile” (151)—because, as she soon demonstrates, she is entirely ignorant of what the situation is. Her first words to him are “Iz, what are you doing with that black child?” (151). She can only imagine worst-case scenarios and she feels it incumbent upon her to stand up for the rights of the “poor kid” (151). Here we see her once again intruding into other people’s affairs and offering advice in her authoritarian voice; Zagrowsky’s description of her as “giv[ing] me a look like God in judgment” reinforces this note perfectly. Emanuel’s response to her overtures, like Cynthia’s in “The Long-Distance Runner,” is not appreciation but fear.

Once Zagrowsky explains that Emanuel is his grandson, Faith cannot help but pry until she gets the whole story, in which, it turns out, she figures rather prominently. Cissy, Zagrowsky’s daughter, was always somewhat unbalanced, but the picketing seems to have been the event that, after the protesters’ departure, triggered her collapse. As Zagrowsky begins to fill in the details for Faith he becomes angrier and angrier with her. He finds it hard to give vent to feelings that he has kept inside, but he asks himself “why should I leave her off the hook” (160) and tells her that “you got to hear the whole story how we suffered” (161). He wants her and her friends to “know what they started” (161), to realize that their political actions have problematic consequences in the real world that they may not be aware of. But Faith doesn’t understand his intention and refuses to accept any responsibility. When he points out how hurt he was by their picketing, for example, she responds, “we were right” (157). When she repeats this rationale later in the story Zagrowsky mockingly labels her “Queen of Right,” and this appellation justly describes her Mrs. Finn-like attitude toward Izzy. For example, when he reminisces about how, before the picketing, he and his daughter were very close and used to dance together, she interjects “I don’t think that was good” (154). Her first comment when he completes his tale of Emanuel’s conception is “Right, Iz, you did the right thing” (171). By this point in the story the reader can only agree with Zagrowsky’s response: “I feel like smacking her. I’m not a violent person, just very excitable, but who asked her?” (170). Zagrowsky’s description of her “sit[ting] there looking at me, nodding her head from rightness” (170) is perfectly accurate and reinforces his earlier description of her as the Queen of Right. She comes across to the reader as “self-righteous, certain, unintentionally but willingly merciless” (Park 487), “insensitive[,] and patronizing” (Taylor 118).

Not only does Faith not question that she had been right in her previous encounters with Zagrowsky, but she again feels called upon to offer him advice about his present situation. She tells him that Emanuel “should have friends his own color, he shouldn’t have the burden of being the only one in school. [H]e should eventually know his own people. It’s their life he’ll have to share” (172). Once again political bromides are uttered and undercut in the same breath, for Faith is showing her own racist attitudes here. Zagrowsky is so enraged that he snaps at her, “Listen, Miss, Miss Faith—do me a favor, don’t teach me” (172). As in “The Long-Distance Runner,” Faith is trying to teach when she should be learning. Even at the end of “Zagrowsky Tells,” however, Faith still seems oblivious to the lesson in understanding that Zagrowsky has tried to teach her. When a young father approaches Zagrowsky to ask him a polite question about Emanuel, the grandfather replies “very loud—no one else should bother me—how come it’s your business, mister?” (174). The man really hasn’t done anything wrong, and Zagrowsky’s anger is displaced from its rightful target, Faith, who has now moved away. When she hears Zagrowsky’s raised voice, however, she comes over to take up his defense, badgering the man until he leaves, with his own child in tears. She then returns to Zagrowsky and says, “Honestly, some people are a pain, aren’t they, Iz?” (175). He, and the reader, could not agree more.

“Zagrowsky Tells” is thus unusual among Paley’s Faith stories for several reasons. It is the only one in the sequence that is narrated from the point of view of someone other than Faith. This allows the reader to gain a greater perspective into her character as it is perceived, not by herself, but by those with whom she interacts. We get a rare outward glimpse of, as Zagrowsky terms it, “her bossy face” (156). In addition, “Zagrowsky Tells” is the only one in the cycle in which Faith does not seem to have gained insight. As the story ends, she and her friends walk off “talking, talking” (211). Faith has indeed been doing a lot of talking in this story, but she hasn’t been doing much listening. Zagrowsky’s story is as significant as Mrs. Luddy’s, but Faith cannot put her preconceptions aside here to really listen to his position. Unlike Zagrowsky, who, in one touching scene, is able to put himself in his daughter’s place as he explains how he believes she came to make love with the gardener (Taylor 116), Faith cannot see beyond herself here. She is much more confident than in the earlier story that her behavior has been proper, and she does not feel the need to question herself. As a result, however, the reader questions her even more carefully. Faith appears to have lost her ability to become aware of her own limited awareness, which makes Paley and the reader all the more aware of it.

Like “The Long-Distance Runner,” then, “Zagrowsky Tells” ultimately “point[s] out the fallacy of [Faith’s] radical idealism and the relativity of the concept of ‘right’” (Baba 51). Because of Paley’s distance from Faith in this story, furthermore, we can sense a continued and even an increased self-questioning on the author’s part. As Jacqueline Taylor notes, “that the character so corrected is so closely identified with the voice of the author only makes the implicit message about the difficulty of really listening to the other all the more powerful” (119). Paley thus appears to be using the story to ask herself to what extent her own political activities have been like Faith’s, well intentioned but ill-advised. She argues on behalf of causes she knows to be right—including civil rights—but she wonders whether she is really well-informed enough to do so, whether she isn’t making of herself a Queen of Right. The fact that she is able to create a character like Zagrowsky, though, indicates that she will continue to ask herself questions about her political conduct. He is the real discovery in this story, and his political action, the local act of taking in and loving one boy, is appropriate and successful, whereas Faith’s grandiose plans are always unworkable. As Neil Isaacs points out, “Zagrowsky is arguing that his experience is more enlightening about racism than any institutional prejudice of the organized abstraction of a demonstration can be” (91). In the character of Zagrowsky, then, Paley is once again demonstrating against racism, as well as using humor to show the difficulty of doing so without succumbing to “the occupational disease of people of good will trying to be responsibly active in this place in democratic time” (Park 487): self-righteousness. As long as Paley can continue to invent characters like Zagrowsky to challenge her political assumptions, it is unlikely that she will fall victim to that trap.

Works Cited

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Antler, Joyce. Introduction. America and I: Short Stories by American Jewish Women Writers. Ed. Joyce Antler. Boston: Beacon, 1990. 1–24.

Baba, Minako. “Faith Darwin as Writer-Heroine: A Study of Grace Paley’s Short Stories” Studies in American Jewish Literature 7 (1988): 40–54.

Eckstein, Barbara, “Grace Paley’s Community: Gradual Epiphanies in the Meantime.” Politics and the Muse: Studies in the Politics of Recent American Literature. Ed. Adam J. Sorkin, Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green SU Popular P, 1989. 124–41.

Fiedler, Leslie. Waiting for the End. 1964 Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1967.

Isaacs, Neil D. Grace Paley: A Study of the Short Fiction. Boston: Twayne, 1990.

Kamel, Rose. “To Aggravate the Conscience: Grace Paley’s Loud Voice.” Journal of Ethnic Studies 11.3 (1983): 29–49.

Paley, Grace. Enormous Changes at the Last Minute. 1974, New York: Farrar, 1991.

———. Later the Same Day. 1985. New York: Penguin, 1986.

———. Long Walks and Intimate Talks. New York: Feminist P, 1991.

Park, Clara Claiborne. “Faith, Grace, and Love.” Hudson Review 38 (1985): 481–88.

Shapiro, Harriet. “Grace Paley: ‘Art Is on the Side of the Underdog.’” Ms. May 1974: 43–45.

Taylor, Jacqueline. Grace Paley: Illuminating the Dark Lives. Austin: U of Texas P, 1990.