[The following interview was originally conducted in 1991, and was originally published in Broken Silences (1993), edited by Shirley M. Jordan. In the interview, Jordan and Paley discuss Paley's feelings about racial relationships, her methods for writing character and dialogue, and relationships between women.]

[Jordan:] What specific conditions seems to be in place when black and white women become friends?

[Paley:] That’s very hard. … Well, there has to be an awful lot of trust. It has to be able to go two ways. But I think mostly the black woman has to be able to trust the white woman. By that I mean that the white woman has to be trustworthy. I could probably think of a better answer but that’s a beginning. A matter of trust that can happen with work when people trust each other—or have a common experience such as children, age. … And it’s also a class thing too, economic class.

I was just going to ask you if the issue of class also plays a part in the forming of these friendships. If the women do not meet in situations in which they are on the same footing socially, it’s hard.

Yes. But that would be true of white women too. It would be more difficult for a black and a white woman. But two white women could have a lot of misunderstanding or different interests too.

That’s also true. Have you noticed distinctions between how black women authors portray characters and how white women portray them?

I’m trying to think of authors. I think the last book I read was by Ellen Douglas who is a Southern white woman author writing about friendships between black and white women. You’ll have to refresh my memory. Her novel is unusual and truthful. In it, the black woman who works as a maid is really portrayed with a lot more feeling than the white woman. The white woman is a decent sort of woman but there is no real understanding. I just met the author, Ellen Douglas, so I paid particular attention.

As you were drawing the character of the black female in “Long Distance Runner” [in Enormous Changes at the Last Minute], what particular concerns did you have about her portrayal? How was this figure born and what do you think of her now that she is actually here?

First of all I come from the Bronx, and so I will give you an example from my background to show how I started her. I have been going back there every year to visit my father and mother’s house. The neighborhood has changed since then. Now there are about four houses left on the block. My father was the neighborhood doctor. Just a couple of years ago I returned. I see this little black girl sitting on my stoop and … well I’m overcome with happiness. She’s sitting there and a woman is looking out the window—the mother I thought (this happened after I wrote the story). I was elated, I almost ran into the house like the woman in the story yelling “Mama! Mama! Let me in!” Anyway I had been going earlier—often—and I had looked at the neighborhood and had seen what was happening—it’s hard to talk about a story that pretty much said what I felt. What I tried to see and maybe know is another life. Not terribly unlike my own, which was full of mommies and daddies and so forth, but still to see another life in the same place. Place being a very important thing. The same place.

I remember what the neighborhood was like. The people who lived on my block then, now have some kind of idealized view of what our street was like. It was really not a rich people’s street. It was a poor people’s street—at least during the ten years of the Depression—most of my childhood and adolescence. Maybe it started out and planned and wanted to be more middle class, but in those days, my days, the street itself was often lined with evictions—people thrown out of their homes for nonpayment of rent. Those were hard times for my neighbors so that it wasn’t hard for me to move into the world of the story, which ends with the narrator asking “What in the world is coming next?” I want to show that in a loving way—loving and truthful, not bullshit.

And I wanted to break certain stereotypes that the narrator has—for instance, when she says she’s going to teach the kid to read, it turns out he’s a great reader. You want to break this thing without a hammer but crack it anyway. That was intentional. But I also wanted to show the truth of that. I don’t know if it’s that story—it is—but there is one house left on this street. Nothing there but rubble and dirt and so forth. There’s a big sheet hanging out the window and it says, “People still live in this God-forsaken neighborhood.” That was just one house. Nothing around it but rubble and dirt and junk.

Do you think others go back too?

Well, I think people do want to go and look at where they grew up—at least if they can. I lived there my whole life until I got married, so I lived there for nineteen years. I was on the streets a lot. Kids used to play in the streets all the time so I had a kind of identity with that kid on my old stoop. I see very little street life in the white neighborhoods in Manhattan. None practically. I mean, it’s really pathetic for children. I had such a nice, rich street life. So the streets themselves are interesting and exciting to me.

Now I live downtown. I’ve lived for years in and around the Village. It’s a very strong neighborhood, and Chelsea is a neighborhood much like it. There are some city areas that aren’t neighborhoods; new people are moving in and new houses are built. A community takes time anywhere. You don’t have a community the minute you move in.

To what extent do you use historical sources when you are developing a character like Ludie or Cynthia?

I just write from my knowledge. Tough little girls and stuff like that—they are all going to have some of the same characteristics, right? “She’s gonna not let the boys push her around and she’s gonna …” I mean you go to school with these kids too. I did. My children did.

What can black and white women teach each other about writing and about living?

Another complicated question. I know this sounds silly to say this but in general white people have a lot to learn about what it means to live in this country. … I’m Jewish and I’ve been in situations—for instance, I lived in a small town in Illinois when I was about twenty or twenty-one, when I first left home. The anti-Semitism was acute and painful to me and surprising since I had lived a ghetto life. I lived in a Jewish ghetto, and there’s nothing more protected than a ghetto. And in its own way, there is probably nothing more protective for little black kids too. It’s kind of nice to be in a kind of cocoon for a while, protected until you get your muscle together. But then we do have to go into the world; we must go into the world. You have got to have your strength to go into the world, and you get some of it from the people you’ve been living your childhood among.

I have a very brutal story in that book [Enormous Changes at the Last Minute] about a killing. You may have read it. This story comes from a guy who was a friend of mine. I met him just after World War II. Late forties. I worked at that time for the Southern Conference for Human Welfare in New York; it was basically just a fund-raiser for the South. There were a lot of black people around even though the group was run by these very idealistic white people who were going in and out of jail. Joe Louis was the chairman, and he would come around sometimes.

But I made friends with this guy, Bill, who was working there; he was from Eclectic, Alabama. I can’t believe these names. We became very close friends. We were friends until he died a couple of years ago. He told me that story, and he didn’t tell it to me once. He told it to me so many times that it was as though I knew it by heart.

A writer in general has to be a person who pays attention. I would say if you’re not the kid sitting under the table who listened to grownups, you’re not going to be a writer black or white. I think it’s that listening. … For white Americans, of any kind, to listen is to begin to understand the country. To listen to blacks particularly is to understand the whole country historically. Slavery was a great curse the United States greedily, foolishly accepted.

One thing I have noticed as I’ve been reading novels in which black and white women appear is that we see fewer novels written by black women that have a central white female figure. Do you think this pattern will remain the same, or do you see black women starting to tell stories through the white female voice?

Well—first of all—people tell their own stories, their unknown stories, and certainly black women’s stories haven’t been properly told by white men or women or black men so they have had a big job on their hands. In general, I think people go through this business of writing about their own people. I mean you had this whole big wave of Jewish literature and what it was, of course, was the first time they could write about their own Jewish experiences and be generally read. I’m just going to make one Jewish comparison here. When I wrote my first stories, they were really explicitly about my own neighborhood life, which I was just trying to understand and then there were a couple of other stories. And then I didn’t need to explore that life so much.

When I wrote my first stories, I was afraid I’d stop writing because I have a lazy nature. I went to the New School for Social Research thinking maybe a class would keep me writing. And I had a teacher who kept saying to me “You’ve got to get off this Jewish dime.” So I asked, “How can I write about a middle America?” What I didn’t have the brains to say then was “I’m not even interested in it yet.” Black women are important and interesting to black women writers. And to be able to write truthfully from where you are toward what you don’t know about yourself, toward what you’re trying to find out, toward your own mysteries and be read, which is possible at this time, is a very great thing. There’s no reason yet for them to write with a central white character unless they were very specifically trying to understand what that person was in relation to blacks. Otherwise, they’d be writing a kind of middle America voice, the sort you hear on the radio or used to. So unless they were after something specific. … But it seems like there is so much yet to tell that hasn’t been told and the new ways of telling are exciting.

So many women are writing now, women of all colors. It’s a wonderful time. Before this, they didn’t know that they could write about themselves. I remember when I wrote my first story—about a woman’s life—I thought, “Gee, this must be boring. This is so boring to everybody. But I don’t care. I can’t help it. I have to write it.” So I think that experience of suddenly being able to talk about ourselves—not just black women, I’m talking about myself and all women—is exciting and curious. And to be read by strangers as well as friends is a great thing.

That leads me to my next question. How do you maintain your own voice or manage to remain true to the voices of the characters without succumbing to pressures from publishers or readers to write either what they want to hear to what they consider proper to write? Has this been an issue at all?

Well as far as the pressures from readers and publishers go, the only time I responded to a publisher was when I was told to write a novel. I had written my first book of stories. And I tried to write a novel and I failed. I mean I really gave it a shot. I did two years of writing a novel. And it was no good. Since then I just do what I want to do. I don’t feel that pressure at all because I don’t think in terms of a career or something like that. I don’t think that way, and I never expected to make a lot of money writing so I teach like all writers do. [Laughs]

Did you grow up aspiring to write?

I grew up aspiring, knowing that I was going to write my whole life because there was all this childhood encouragement. Every time you wrote a sentence, somebody said, “That is very good,” so then you wrote two sentences. But people should not worry about this kind of pressure, not if they really want to write. I mean if their reason to write is to speak truthfully, writers must give their characters a full life and a truthful life—that’s the only job a writer has.

Suppose you’re writing something so radical that you think you can’t find a publisher for it, then you still don’t consider the publisher but pursuing the truthfulness of the story?

See, when I wrote my first book, I got every story back again and again and again. Every single one. I mean until suddenly the University of Illinois printed two stories and that was it for the whole book. None of the others were accepted. I could have been very discouraged, and I mean I could have succumbed if I hadn’t by luck gotten a publisher. I wouldn’t have stopped writing though. But you really have to stick by your vision because life isn’t so long really. It’s always something. It’s just as hard to fit somebody’s—a publisher’s—idea of what writing is as it is to write your own way. They’re equally hard. So you might as well be hung for who you are. [Laughs] Cause they’ll get you. They get you anyway … so … I mean look at publishing today. It’s in such a weird shape anyway that you have to go to small presses if you’re starting out.

As you are writing, are you ever conscious of race or ethnicity in a very overt way as you allow characters to come to life, or is it the story that is more important? Therefore, you’re concentrating on the story and not so much on “This is the Jewish person who has to speak” and “This is a black person who has to speak.”

No. No. Well … I’m thinking of what I’m writing, and I’m letting the characters work their way through to the story. When I wrote “Long Distance Runner,” I just began with the narrator running. I really had no plan. I did not know where I was going and when I got to the street, I didn’t know I was going upstairs. And so you just sort of open yourself up to it, and by not knowing you have more tension somehow. There is some kind of great pull like a great stretch. And you stretch toward something that you don’t understand totally and that then pulls you along somehow. The stretch and the tension in it I think is the way it works. So when I get the people I have to figure out how they evolve and sometimes I do the best I can. And what I also do is I read it aloud to myself. I read it aloud so that I try to get it right. Sometimes I show it to other people. It’s funny when I wrote this story with a lot of black speech. I didn’t feel so comfortable about it at all, and I wouldn’t have for some reason. I didn’t know if I could do it.

As the story is pulling you along, what do you do when other things also demand some of your time like picking up the kids or whatever?

Oh, you mean my life? Ah, it’s very hard. Some people are very organized. I talked to Mary Gordon. She puts aside the time. She has two kids, adores them, gives them a lot. But she organizes her time well, and she gets a novel out every couple of years. She is young and in another time than I am. She is the age of my children. But as for me it was always push and pull and pull and push. And then I had two children, and then I also had jobs, and I did a lot of politics too. I mean I just did it. It was a very rich period; I don’t feel bad about any of it. And I would sit and talk with my children, take them to the park; they would give me a lot. In fact, they sometimes became my subject matter. So I can’t really say I shouldn’t have done that because that’s what was interesting to me then.

But I was lucky enough to have child care. Everybody—not just writers, to hell with writers—but all women do have to have decent child care. And I don’t think I could have accomplished all that I did without having a certain amount of child care. Basically, it was a settlement house in the neighborhood, which was cheap—what I could afford which wasn’t much. It’s hard but you gotta stick with it. [Pauses] Just think of a woman who really has some rotten job who is running back and forth with the kids. I’m particularly lucky to have some wonderful thing I want to do.

Back to the protagonist of “Long Distance Runner.” She seems so much at home in the community even near the beginning when she first gets into the neighborhood and there are all these people around her. She seems alert and on guard but she never seems to me afraid for her life—at least most of the time she isn’t. …

Yeah, when she runs up there and the kid starts yelling at her.

I thought that that scene really moves far beyond the stereotype.

It’s a little surrealistic.

That’s it! She couldn’t be that naïve, and I didn’t think she could be that open-minded but I suppose she could have felt at home. After all, if she has returned home, she wouldn’t be as afraid anyway.

I think it’s a couple of things. It was quite surrealistic. No one would stand there and say … On the other hand, there is a certain naïveté. Even her deciding to give the little boy a reading lesson—I mean there was a kind of good-hearted naïveté about her in a sense. But it also had a surrealistic quality. … I mean the whole thing is invented. It’s not very likely she would say those things. None of that is likely but all of it is in the realm of the barely possible. She might have gone up there in her shorts …

And maybe it’s the naïveté that allows her to get even that far. If she were truly just sitting around reasoning out everything, she probably wouldn’t have run that far off course.

Yes. Yes. I’m nearly seventy. I come from a less fearful time. I used to have to pick up the collection boxes for the Southern Conference about forty-five years ago. I walked up and down apartment houses in Harlem, jangling shopping bags full. I never thought about it. I was afraid of the Irish neighborhoods though when I was a kid—because of Father Coughlin.

I’m sure you have heard the following said of your work before, but I will add my compliment as well. You capture the speech of the characters so brilliantly that the words seem naturally to flow from the characters’ mouths. How did you develop your ear to capture Black English on the page without it sounding like “and now here is a black person speaking” versus “here is a person speaking in his or her own way who happens to be black?”

I don’t know. It goes back to listening. I think a lot of people could do better than they do. I say the dialogue aloud to myself. I can’t tell you how many times I change the words. The smallest sentence I change many times. I mean any ten-word sentence I must have changed ten times. I rarely got it right. That’s the main thing. I rarely got it right the first time, and I rarely got it right the third time. But it’s this business of saying things aloud again and again. You know poets read aloud, right? And fiction writers don’t do that so much in working. But just to say it again and again. You will get it. You may not get it perfect but you’ll get it a lot better than—say—if you write it once and you say, “Oh I can’t write dialogue.” If you haven’t been listening to people, you’ll never get any kind of sound, but if you have been listening, then I think you can get it. But as I said I really have more self-consciousness right now.

It didn’t seem self-conscious in the story at all.

But that was because I rewrote it after it was in my head a long time. I wrote it, and then I made certain changes. I got it right, I think. It didn’t begin with me being self-conscious. I began with the idea that I could do it, and then I only had to make the effort to and do it. I don’t remember where, but I feel like I went off someplace. But that story, “Lavinia,” was very much like my grandmother’s story, and I wanted, in my mind, to bring people closer together. I wanted to show the same kind of story really in one case in the older immigrant woman and in this case, the working black woman. Married, didn’t want children, wanted to make something of herself and had children. And then wanted her daughter to make something of herself. And it’s not that the daughter went bad. I don’t want her to become the bad person. What she did was live with a guy, just begin to have a lot of children. It didn’t seem like she was going to do something with herself—from the old woman’s view.

When we look at the protagonist leaving the neighborhood, Ludie tells her that it’s time for her to go suggesting that she understands the protagonist perhaps in ways that she does not know she really understands. How does Ludie intuitively seem to know when it is time to leave? She’s accepted this stranger into her home as if that were the natural thing to do, and then she seems to know exactly when she ought to leave. Is that just her instincts at work?

I think also it’s the surrealistic part of it. I wanted her to leave. [Laughs] She’d been a guest an awful long time, and nothing is more annoying than people telling people how to raise their children. Like telling them to go downstairs. Tell them to do this; they need more air. They would get really pissed at that.

The protagonist is renewed by her journey back. At the end of the story, we see her at home. In particular, what has she learned from her journey back to the neighborhood—to her roots?

Well, she says that at the end, she’s learned “what in the world is coming next.”

Do you think our stereotypes of interracial relationships and of sexuality keep us apart as women rather than becoming closer?

Yes.

From the perspective of both races?

Yes, but I really think from the point of view of black women. … First as real people and as valuable people I can see their suspicion is historically so reasonable, but on the other hand, what it means is that white people, white women who are really interested have to prove themselves, and when people start to prove themselves, they become somewhat false. I mean not a bad false. I don’t mean anything like untrue or anything like that. I mean they become unnatural and then a certain falsity sets into the relationship. And that has to happen, and that happens a lot. I think it can’t help but happen. It’s not anyone’s fault. Our terrible history—oppression and hatred.

It’s probably one of the hardest hurdles to cross in learning to trust.

Yeah. It’s a hard thing for people to act naturally together.

Once you start to make the effort to do so then that’s when the falsity sets in.

Yes, so people have to sort of recognize that falsity not as an evil thing sometimes but as an unnatural effort. Not meaning ill. And that goes both ways too. Listen, this business of suspicion between people who have hurt each other in one way or another. … What bothers me about say my own family or a lot of Jewish people I know who are really open-minded. … People think that the persecution of Jewish people started with the Holocaust. The Holocaust is the moment like the bringing over of slaves in our recent history. If Jews just thought about the way they’ve been treated in a daily way not just forty years ago but about a thousand years ago, they could identify better. Put away the most recent experience and think of what their ordinary life—just their daily life was like—not just the genocidal moment, but everything, then they would really understand better the daily life others live. And that’s one of the things they don’t do. So one of the arguments I have, like the idea that their neighborhoods were so great, is that they were just like any good people. I remember my mother going to Orchard Beach and saying, “Look what a mess! Our people were here.” But when I tell that to my sister, she says, “No. No. We were never like that. We were never like that.” [Laughs] Mama said that. She said that: “Our people were here. It’s dirty. Let’s go to another beach.” [Laughs again]

That makes me think about blacks and how we remember slavery. I think sometimes people my age and older become frustrated with black teenagers who—not that they don’t want to remember slavery—don’t make it the pinnacle of all black experience. We think that they don’t fully understand and that often frustrates us.

Well, I think a lot of the kids think things are bad enough. “What are you going back there for? Why do you keep talking about that when here I am on this block, you know?” So going back has many possibilities.

What are some of the uses of memory or history you see at work in your fiction?

Well for me, I like to go back into my parents’ life, and I have a number of stories like that—stories from my father and history. There’s a story called “A Conversation with My Father,” which to me is historical. It is seen by a lot of people as a psychological father/daughter thing, but to me it is clearly a historical statement. More than that the father comes from a place where change is not possible. That’s one thing. He has that rigidity and also he comes from a world where he says she’ll never change, it’s like that. It’s more historical than psychological, and I’m more interested in the historical than I am in the psychological.

When you look at young children and teenagers who do not know their own family histories and do not have or know the words to recount their experiences or what they see, what kinds of things do you think ought to be done to help them gain control over their own voices?

Well, I just think, first of all, we tell them stories from history, not just the stories that happen to Grandma and Grandpa, but also tales of the past. From my own experience, I am not religious at all but I really enjoyed stories from the Bible when I was a kid. I felt related to them, so I told my children these stories. My son has told my granddaughter too, though he has no religious feeling. It’s the way that our own old stories connect us to our past, and the stories of other people connect us to their past, so that we read not just our own stories but the stories of other people to know history, to make connections. And I really think that’s very useful to children to ground them and to place them among the generations. I want to tell you a good assignment that I did with kids. Exactly related to this. I didn’t know it was going to work out so well. Just before Thanksgiving I said when you get home ask the oldest person there to tell you a story he or she remembers by the oldest person he or she knew. One of the women went back through great-great grandparents to slavery. In fact that’s one of the stories in “Long Distance Runner.” When the little kid says, “I remember that story, ‘Freedom Now,’” that’s the one that student had told me. She’s the one who told me that story. Her grandfather told her what his grandmother had told him. This is the story of how they ran from cabin to cabin. So you can go way way back. That was one of the best. I’ve done the assignment again, and you go pretty far back.

Did you want to make any comments about “Lavinia” at all?

The story came from that common experience that seems to me to be a class experience, a common women’s experience. Someone said to me, “Well, why didn’t you just tell your grandmother’s story instead of doing this?” And I guess I was just extremely interested, and it would have been boring to do it in my grandmother’s voice at that particular time because what I was after was trying to understand what it would have been like for someone else. And I had been talking to this old black woman, Mrs. Pinchner, who had told me the same story anyway—exactly the same story. And it just seemed that I wanted to tell her story. In that whole period of my life I felt as a white woman that I wanted to understand more and also try to make some kind of contribution in a sense. Somehow I should understand and help other people to understand to see certain commonalities. And also the whole female subject, the whole business of these two women saying, “We wanted to be teachers. We didn’t want to have all those children,” interested me.

In growing up in the Bronx, what made you open to wanting to understand all cultures?

Well, first of all, my parents were socialists who came from Russia. They’d been in prison in Russia when they were eighteen, nineteen years old so they were very young when they emigrated. And when they came here they didn’t do a lot of politics. They had to work too hard. All my aunts worked in the garment district to make my father a doctor. They were all about twenty years old. Think of all these young people coming over, and they worked very hard so he could become a doctor, and he became one. He was always a neighborhood doctor. And the office was in the house so there were always people coming and going. And there was always sickness, and there was always a lot of feeling for other people’s suffering. My father, unlike some doctors, had a lot of feeling, identification with pain. In fact, so much so that by the time he was sixty he just had to stop. He couldn’t handle it anymore.

So I think it began with that, and then we read the papers at breakfast and all these things were happening in America. People were being actually lynched. And the Armenians got into my head too. All those worries—the pogroms my parents went through—uncles killed or deported from this country in the repressions that followed the First World War and the Russian Revolution.

And then I had a very small but strong experience. Children in the street used to play among many other games—

eenie meenie minie mo
catch a nigger by the toe …

My sister gave me such a crack across the face. When I remind her of this now, she asks wondering, proudly I think, “Where did I get such an idea?” She said to me that day, “Never let me hear you talk like that ever again.” I mean that was a traumatic smack. So that’s an early remembered corroboration from the family. As you go on, you realize that you’ve said a bad thing, which will mean a sad painful thing to someone else and that leads to other ways of thinking. It moves from person to the community to the world. It’s not so good if it stays in the area of personal kindness—in fact it could be dangerous if there’s no wider political understanding. Anyway—with experience of other people’s suffering, my sister’s smack remained a lasting education. And we did have black women and occasionally men working in the household and office a lot of the time, and they totally engaged me as often happens. But because of my family’s old politics, they had gotten a lot less radical actually, these conversations were socializing and useful—and also established remembrances of personal love.