(Brittany Holloway-Brown / For The Times; Getty Images, Smithsonian)
I begin working as a temporary lecturer at different colleges around the city. It is my first time teaching undergraduates and it feels almost as natural as writing does. I make it a point to introduce my students to the literature of their home state, which includes Joan Didion, a standby and giant of what we now call creative nonfiction.
I teach my students about Didion’s ancestor, Nancy Hardin Cornwall, who trekked westward with the Donner-Reed party in 1846. When they reached the Humboldt Sink in Nevada, Cornwall in a fateful decision decided to split with the party. The Donner-Reeds ended in infamy and Cornwall landed in Oregon. Didion’s family eventually settled in Sacramento, where several generations would tend to their roots and Didion would eventually be born. The lesson is an introduction to the history of California and one of its most potent myths: that of the pioneers. This myth, among others, such as California’s economic dominance and its reputation as a peaceful liberal haven, Didion sought to problematize in her writing.
It’s Didion’s ability to undermine — to slip a blade between the ribs — in a single sentence that has always thrilled the critic in me. Her strict economy, honed by her early years of writing and endlessly revising (under the exacting eye of Allene Talmey) tight captions for Vogue, thrills the editor in me.
One day, the Santa Ana winds stoke a raging fire on the Getty Center hill, threatening the mansions south of Sunset. In class, I read aloud from Didion’s “Los Angeles Notebook”: I have neither heard nor read that a Santa Ana is due, but I know it, and almost everyone I have seen today knows it too. We know it because we feel it. …
I cut class short and shuffle quickly back to my faculty house just off campus, where we moved from Culver City after I was hired as a full-time lecturer. My husband and I arrange to collect my grandparents Sue and Ed from their apartment just south of Sunset Boulevard, which marks the boundary of the current evacuation area. Once they’re in our grip, we hum on pleasant nervous energy all weekend, watching the sky turn lilac at dusk, eating Taiwanese takeout from around the corner, wondering when things will return to normal. Ed wakes up first, has his coffee and studies. He is a student in a lifelong learning program at UCLA; he takes extensive notes in notebooks and in the margins of his many books. Ed and my husband have voluminous conversations about obscure historical figures and the state of humanity. My grandmother positions a chair in front of the windows of our sunroom, which look out onto the neighboring hills dotted with bungalows, Tuscan pines and tall palm trees. She reads a romance novel and does Sudoku and dreams. The symmetry of our lives becomes apparent. Over the past year, the stability afforded by our careers has brought calm to my relationship with my husband. I realize that if all goes well, our lives will look a lot like theirs in a few decades, and I’d be perfectly happy with that.
The author Zinzi Clemmons with her grandparents and husband.
(Zinzi Clemmons)
Soon enough, the fires subside and we cart my grandparents back across town to their apartment. The air is still heavy with smoke, but they are safe. In class, we arrive at “Slouching Towards Bethlehem,” and my students’ quiet fascination with Didion turns to stone. For years, Didion’s hippie subjects were distant historical figures to me, as foreign to a Philadelphian as the Pacific Ocean, but here they are, the mothers, aunts and neighbors of the bemused young faces staring back at me.
When we read “The White Album,” the class is fascinated by Didion’s renovations of form and enthralled by her proximity to the Manson Family. But then there is the issue of the protests at San Francisco State College. Late in the essay, Didion arrives on that campus soaked in ennui and finds an institution in the grips of political demonstrations that she paints as delusions. The agitations for justice she mockingly compares to an Evelyn Waugh novel and “a musical comedy about college life.”
Paul is one of a handful of black students I’ve had since I began teaching. Proudly, he informs the class that the protest that Didion derides led to the establishment of the first ethnic studies department in the United States. Four years ago, students at this college slept in the administration building next door, their demands all too similar to those that Didion mocked in her essay. The college established an interdisciplinary Black Studies major, with professors who cycle in and out during my time here. When he’s done speaking, Paul looks back down at the table, grinds his palms together. He doesn’t meet my eyes and shuffles quickly out the door when the class ends.
All that weekend, I can’t shake the look of disappointment on Paul’s face, can’t stop feeling like I’d broken the invisible contract between us. It was my duty to teach the canon, even if I didn’t agree with Didion, because my students needed to be aware of her. My husband tells me, as he always does, that I shouldn’t be so hard on myself. I try to write, but nothing comes.
The next week, Paul doesn’t turn in his story for the workshop. I’m notified by the school that he is ill, and a few days later, I learn that he’s taken his life.
Paul is the second student at our tiny college to die in the space of a single month. Both of them are black, and at a school with a population of about 2,000, they represent a statistically significant portion of the college’s minuscule black population.
The college holds a community gathering with counselors and chaplains on hand where we run through grief exercises and write memories of Paul on slips of colored construction paper. It’s mostly teachers who show up. I’m wrecked, but I try my best to reflect composure. The whole exercise feels pointless. Midway through the proceedings, one of Paul’s friends stands up. “This college is killing us,” he announces, and then leaves the room.
A couple of days later, Paul’s friends organize a memorial on the main quad. Everyone wears white, and an enlarged portrait of Paul sits on an easel overlooking the quad. They wheel in a loudspeaker, pass around a microphone and play Pop Smoke and Nipsey Hussle in between remembrances (two black men whose lives, by that point, had also been cut short). I wear a white T-shirt and my work pants. I watch his friends embrace from a bench at the back of the crowd. There are mostly students of color, myself and a Latino administrator. Under a tree stand two campus police officers in full gear and sunglasses, arms folded across their chests, surveying the crowd.
In “Sentimental Journeys,” Didion reflects accurately on the many false narratives about life in New York City and how this tendency to mythos distorted the reaction to the case of the Central Park jogger, making villains of the five black boys who would be jailed as defendants and later exonerated. “For those who proceeded from the conviction that there was under way a conspiracy to destroy blacks, particularly black boys, a belief in the innocence of these defendants, a conviction that even their own statements had been rigged against them or wrenched from them, followed logically.” She presents this idea as fallacy, the imaginings of a hysterical black public when, in fact, this is exactly what happened. Didion’s musings on the city and the trial have aged very well, with the glaring exception of this section, where her racism dramatically limits her analysis. This remains the most enduring and fatal criticism of her entire body of work.
I’ve been under the spell of Didion’s sentences for years. A part of me will always love Didion. But what happens when the one you love doesn’t love you back?
After five years in Los Angeles I’m summoned north for a job at the University of California. We end up not far from where Didion grew up, in a small city outside of Sacramento that I’ve never been to or even seen on a map, in the state’s agricultural Central Valley. Every few weeks, we hear tires screeching on the I-80 and occasionally the crunch of metal. We read in the paper one morning about a road-rage incident in which a driver shot at cars in traffic. When the police arrived, he fled his vehicle, escaped from the highway, and ran through our neighborhood while the police pursued by car, helicopter and on foot. By the time we wake up, the shelter-in-place order has been lifted.
In my mid-20s, I began breaking out in hives spontaneously. They would appear at seemingly random times: sometimes after physical exertion, but also sometimes after sitting still. Sometimes after eating but also sometimes when I’d been sitting for a while, reading or watching television. The breakouts happen more frequently here, and they become more debilitating. My skin worsens. The rainy winter passes with no major incidents, but as the weather gets warmer and drier, the environment takes its toll on my body. I find that I can no longer eat things I could in Los Angeles. Wheat is out of the question. I can’t even think about butter. And then, as winter turns to spring, I develop, for the first time, cold sores at the edges of my lips. I go through bottle after bottle of medicine, only to have them return a short while later.
What distinguished Didion is her style, so carefully milled as to be not noticed at first. It took me a few reads to really be captured by her, but when I was, she took hold. When I moved here I began to understand her, to feel her. Her sentences are somewhat flat in tone, but the excitement comes from the acuity in her observations, which accumulate over pages to assemble a full, clear picture.
Sacramento is a flat landscape where the rhythms of life mimic the crop season. The winter is wet and cold by California standards, requiring a light parka, and the summer heat — which lasts from May until October — is scorching, usually hovering in the mid- to upper 90s, and consistently in the triple digits in June, July and August. There is snow on the mountains, dense fog that blankets crops in the fall, giving life to wine-country grapes, fires in the dry season and the occasional earthquake. Out here, you watch this cycle of violent rebirth and destruction every year, which mirrors the politicians that cycle in and out of state office in Sacramento’s downtown.
In “Why I Write,” Didion describes her writing process as one of capturing “pictures that shimmer”: “You can’t think too much about these pictures that shimmer. You just lie low and let them develop. You stay quiet. You don’t talk to many people and you keep your nervous system from shorting out.” I don’t feel Didion’s presence right away, but as my months wear on here, slowly she develops.
Our financial situation slowly improves. We rent a brand-new townhouse, complete with stainless-steel appliances, motorized blinds and a two-car garage, for the same price as a one-bedroom apartment in Los Angeles. It’s the first time I’ve rented a house with stairs, more space than we know what to do with. We have barely enough furniture to fill half of it; we buy a new mattress without a bed frame and sleep on the floor. We develop a taste for nice wines, which are produced in abundance and sold cheaply in the region. Oftentimes, we sit on our balcony, awestruck at our luck.
This new life chafes my husband more than me. For months after his parents left, he suffered panic attacks in grocery stores. He’d stand in the aisles overwhelmed by the Technicolor labels, the piles of Edenic produce, and the thought that his family — wherever they may be — might not be able to afford food. The knowledge that they wouldn’t accept our help if offered only makes the pain even worse.
Though we weren’t rich, I grew up never going without. My father is a sensible man. He’s owned Honda Accords for my entire life, drives them until they stop running and then buys another. He’s never bought an item of clothing over fifty dollars. My mother was a spendthrift. For her, assimilation took the form of middle-class attainment: a nice home, Coach purses and a leased C-Class Mercedes.
Whatever success I’ve achieved has hung awkwardly on me. I lay these facts alongside my decision to become a writer. I consider them in the light of our 10-foot windows, try to parse them as I stare at another perfect California sunset.
Everywhere next to highways and railroad tracks, in empty parking lots and fields, you will see tarps and shopping carts piled by the side of the road, people walking about, chatting, living their everyday lives in view of drivers on their morning commutes. You will notice most of the unhoused are not white, and in fact about one-quarter of them are black, even though black people are only 7 percent of the state’s population. Black California lives on freeway exits and underpasses, in tents and lean-tos. This is where the dream ends for so many of my parents’ generation, who once came westward on the whisper of hope. These are the Great Migration’s children.
I have always prided myself on my grit, but this place has made me realize that perhaps East Coast toughness masks a greater vulnerability. That as difficult as New York and Philadelphia are, with their towering housing projects and subway systems and social strata, those structures also protect human beings from the elements. In the Central Valley, there is only heat and wind, with no mountains or buildings to break them. In the summer, the temperature is always above 100; in the winter, the wind howls and shakes our townhouse. The fires rage. The earth trembles.
My body refuses to adjust, a technical result of the harsh climate and lack of humidity. But I see it as something deeper: a manifestation of the deep turbulence at the heart of this place. The California Dream is just like the American one: a total lie. But there is no paradise on earth, and for now and forever in some way, this place is my home.
The above essay is excerpted from the essay “Home Going” in “Freedom” by Zinzi Clemmons, published by Viking this June.
