Zami: A New Spelling of My Name - Plot Summary

Plot Summary

Audre Lorde grows up in Harlem, a child of Black West Indian parents. Legally blind as a child, she learns to read before going to school, thus stoking up wrath in the Nuns/teachers at her Catholic school. The family's landlord hangs himself for having to rent his flat to Black people; later they take a trip to Washington D.C., where they are refused ice-cream because of segregation laws. After getting her first period at age 15, she makes friends with a small number of non-Black girls, called "The Branded" at Hunter College High School. She is even elected literary editor of the school's arts magazine - she has started writing poetry. After graduation, she leaves home and shares a flat with friends of Jean's (one of The Branded). At the same time, she also goes out with Peter, a white boy who jilts her on New Year's Eve - she is pregnant and decides on an abortion. After some unhappy times at Hunter College, she moves to Stamford, Connecticut, to find work in a factory, where the working conditions prove atrocious. Following her father's death, she returns to NYC and starts a relationship with Bea, whose heart she ends up breaking when she decides to move to Mexico to get away from McCarthyism. There, she goes to university and works as a secretary in a hospital. In Cuernavaca, she meets a lot of independent women, mostly lesbians; she has a relationship with one of them, Eudora, and works in a library. Back in NYC, Audre explores the lesbian bar scene, moves in with lover Muriel, then another lesbian, Lynn, moves in with them and ends up leaving without warning and with their savings. Finally, Audre begins a relationship with a mother named Afrekete, who decides to leave to tend to her child. The book ends on a homage to Audre's mother.