Andrea Lee wrote Interesting Women Stories. It is a collection of mature and provocative stories about American women living abroad. Lee has written several novels, and her short stories and essays have been published in The New Yorker. She is an American living in Italy. Her stories have an authenticity which grabs the reader and one wonders if these fantastic stories represent the real-world of those who inhabit that life.
What I find most interesting about the book is not so much the stories, however much I enjoy them; it is that in the middle of the book, sandwiched by those stories is a short play titled “The Golden Chariot.” The prelude reads:
A musical comedy… starring a middle-class American Negro family and their brand-new 1962 metallicized Rambler Classic. All of them headed on an epic summer vacation trip across America, from Philadelphia to the Seattle World’s Fair.
It is a very honest, raw, and, sometimes, painful story. Lee shares what it was like to be a successful, middle-class Black family in 1962, and offers us the opportunity to compare “then and now.” The “Chariot” is so well-written and candidly honest, that the reader feels her or himself to be a part of their experience.
The book could be a metaphor for most of us. On the outside others see our “public self” or “personal self.” They can never see the intrapersonal. It is there we have our family stories that are pleasurable and painful which are sometimes hard to share with others. These stories have made us, have transformed us and determine how we live our lives.
Many times, I have asked myself why Lee would write this book of fiction and in the middle of the book place this, most likely, autobiographical play. Is this her way of sharing the pain of segregation and discrimination of her growing up years?
If we live long enough, sooner or later, we have to face the truth of the pleasurable and painful stories of growing up in our families. Perhaps Lee had to share her story this way, because it was too painful to stand alone.
We cannot discard our past. As a nation or as individuals. We have to accept the reality of the situations of our lives and allow them to inform a better life now.
Whatever stories are sandwiched deep in the middle of our lives, let us use them to make life better, our own and others.
See you in church, Rev. Lillie