Faith S. Holsaert: "Chosen Girl," 2003

Reprinted with the permission of Faith S. Holsaert. Copyright (c) 2003 by Faith S. Holsaert.

Introduction by Jonathan Ned Katz

This long short story (80,000 words), set in the 1950s, in progressive, literary Greenwich Village, subtly evokes the loving, conflicted, and ultimately thwarted intimacy between two women, one white and the other African American, as told through the eyes of the white woman's smart, observant daughter. The three live together.

The story communicates the McCarthy-era fears, casual racism, and homophobic pressures of this particiular time and place (and as I personally recall them -- as a child I lived on the same street as Holsaert and knew her family).

The writer, Faith Holsaert, was raised on Jane Street, in the Village, in a two-mother family by her Jewish mother by birth, Eunice Holsaert, and Charity Bailey, her mother by affection. Bailey was the music teacher at the Little Red School House where Faith was enrolled, and Bailey later hosted a children's TV show in New York City.

I also attended "Little Red," as we called this "progressive school," and fondly remember "Charity" (we called most of our teachers by their first names) visiting my family, discussing the history of Black spirituals with my father who knew much African American history and culture. I also recall Charity radiating concern for and kindness toward young people, a kindness to which I especially responded. I also remember coming home from a 1950s visit to Charity Bailey's and Eunice Holsaert's apartment and my mother asking, circumspectly, without explanation, how many beds there were. I understood, I think, that she was asking whether the two women slept together, and I recall being annoyed at her prying suspicion. Like much fiction, "Chosen Girl" seemingly contains more than a few autobiographical elements.

Faith Holsaert has published numbers of stories and memoirs, mostly in small literary journals. “Chosen Girl” was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. “Creekers” (fiction) won first place in the Kentucky Writers Coalition Competition, in 2004. That year, “Freedom Rider, circa 1993” (fiction) won third place in the Fugue Annual Contest in Prose. “History Dancing,” a memoir, appeared in the autumn of 2006, in a collection published by University of Iowa Press.

I highly recommend this sensitive, wonderfully written art about history, and I'm also pleased to honor the memory of Charity Bailey, a beloved teacher, who, I believe, had she lived into the present, could have understood our need to look back and specify what we see. "Chosen Girl" is also available in paginated form on the web publication The King's English at: http://home.comcast.net/~wapshot1/spr09/TKE.NF2004.pdf

"Chosen Girl" by Faith S. Holsaert

I.

In the beginning were my parents, shoulder to shoulder, the baby floating within their massed outline. I sat close, in either lap, during their disputes. My father said, "Oliver Twist. It's a wretched book, Deirdre. You like it because you read it as a child." "I like it because it's about people. Not like your Eliot, who writes about things."

"Deirdre, Fagan's a sentimental abomination." She held me tight against her bosom, and I learned how her muscles tightened when she clenched her teeth. “Well I love that book.”

“Fagan’s an anti-Semitic stereotype,” said my WASP father. She struck quickly. “Are you Virginia Woolf to my Leonard?” My Jewish mother.

Silence.

That was the form. Books and books and books. A book to say I love you. A book to say I hate you. Later, they attacked one another, down to the muscles of the hands that held me, saying names like Henry James, Robert Browning. When they agreed, Auden. The way they loved me was to teach me what they knew. And what they knew was books.

Before I could read, my father taught me how to open a new book. First I must riffle the pages, feel the paper with my fingertip, and smell the lingering odor of ink. His fingers were tapered, cool half moons at the base of each ridged nail. His hand warm. I must: open near the beginning of the book; press the book open until the spine gave; move through the pages in quarter-inch increments to crack the spine until the book lay supple and ready in my hand.

Books were their lifeblood. Later, Laurel would say the same about the blues.

▼▪▲

At four, I drew a scowling face on black construction paper with waxy red. My mother asked, "What is it?" I said, "The Angry Mother." My mother wrote, The Angry Mother, in pencil. I didn't like the silver graphite letters on my dull black paper with my scrawled red.

That evening over drinks, she showed it to my father. I snatched it from her.

"It's mine," I said.

She crushed my hands in hers. "Don't interrupt."

"I hate you," I screamed.

"A touch of the angry child?" my father asked, with a smile as thin as the slivered almond he fed me.

My mother knelt in front of me and stared rudely into my eyes. "You will say you're sorry."

I wouldn’t, so I was sent to my room.

I stared angrily at photos of my mother and her two brothers and sister, each mounted within a sepia oval. Her older brother, at age five or six, was in a sailor suit; the younger brother smiled from blonde curls and skirts; the sister at age seven or so, looked out from her oval with a studied gaze, chin propped on a ringed hand; my mother, a toddler, scowled from her oval, light tulle clutched to her bosom.

In the light from my bedside lamp, when I tilted my drawing with its red image, the silvery caption slid off the page.

▼▪▲

Laurel, the music teacher.

In my first memory of her, I stood beside the upright piano in the nursery classroom. The piano strings jangled. I could see the lines in the skin on the back of her hand as Laurel played absently. It was a hand smaller than my father's, squarer than my mother's. I reached out to touch it and she laughed and struck the keys. She took my hand, pushed my finger onto a key. A puny sound. She said my voice was as soft as this -- she plinked, the highest note. I went home and told my parents I wanted Laurel to live with us.

“She is colored,” my mother said.

“Colored?” I shrilled.

“Haven't you noticed her skin?” my father asked.