They knew little about this strange country, but Linda knew about Paradise Plums candy, mixing oils and tinctures, praying to the Virgin Mary, and making virtues out of necessities. She knew what people were thinking, knew about food, and knew the Museum of Natural History was where you took kids so they would be smart. Linda missed the singing that was everywhere in Grenada; America was “cold and raucous” (11). Byron did not like to talk about home, and wanted to make his home here.

Gennie's "young, and pretty, and very reasonable" (90) mother, who "seemed very modern" (90). She had a very close relationship with Gennie and was opposed to her getting involved with her father. Phillip Thompson Failing in college and eager to escape from New York, Audre moves to Stamford, Connecticut, and takes a job in a factory. There, she begins a relationship with one of the other workers, a woman called Ginger who has already been married and divorced. Even after they begin sleeping together, Audre is uncertain about the nature of her relations with Ginger, who seems to enjoy sex with women but not to see it as any kind of serious commitment. Lorde never grappled with only one aspect of identity. She was as concerned with class, gender, and sexuality as she was with race. She held these concerns and did so with care because she valued community and the diversity of the people who were part of any given community. She valued the differences between us as strengths rather than weaknesses. Doing this was of particular urgency, because to her mind, “the future of our earth may depend upon the ability of all women to identify and develop new definitions of power and new patterns of relating across difference.”When Lorde learned to write her name at 4 years old, she had a tendency to forget the Y in Audrey, in part because she “did not like the tail of the Y hanging down below the line,” as she wrote in Zami: A New Spelling of My Name. “I used to love the evenness of AUDRELORDE,” she explained. She included the Y to abide by her mother, but eventually dropped it when she got older.

Phyllis and Helen were much closer to each other in age and thus Lorde often felt like an only child. She longed for a younger sister, and knew that it could only come from magical means as the Lorde family was not going to expand naturally any more. As the youngest she felt she had privileges but no rights, and that if there were another child it had to be a girl because if it were a boy, it would belong to her mother and not to her. She is right about so much, and so much of what she says we desperately need to hear in these broken and divided times. Genevieve was not only Lorde’s first real friend, but the first girl she fell in love with. Her death weighs on her conscience—what if she could have saved her? What if she had told her how she felt? What if they had been able to fully experience their love for each other, previously only hinted at by holding hands as they wandered New York City together? Lorde’s memories of her love for Genevieve will shape everyone she falls in love with after. Lorde did not return to New York City until she heard that her father had passed away. She soon decided to move to Mexico, a place that was full of allure, especially to someone who was outside society’s margins during the repressive 1950s. I must add that these things are not separable. I cannot in any kind of faith tease it out as a strand. Audre writes of loving women inside all these other shells and spaces and non-spaces, all these stiflings and terrors and sufferings, all these joys and expansions into self and glory. Loving women, unfolding into all these places of being, where it seems to Audre that lesbians are the only women talking to each other, supporting each other emotionally at all in the '50s. She and her friends and lovers invent the sisterhood the feminist movement obsessed about decades later.In the first few chapters, we meet Lorde’s parents and Lorde as a young girl. Lorde makes it very clear at the outset of the text that this is a story of how the women in her life contributed to the formation of her identity—not men. The woman who takes up the most (psychic) space in Lorde’s life is Linda, her mother. Linda is a powerful, imposing woman. She had a “public air of in-charge competence” that was “quiet and effective” (16). She was different than other women, Lorde believed, but it was only when she was older did she see that her mother “took pains…to hide from us children the many instances of her powerlessness” (17). Each one of us had been starved for love for so long that we wanted to believe that love, once found, was all-powerful. We wanted to believe that it could give word to my inchoate pain and rages; that it could enable them to face the world and get a job; that it could free our writings, cure racism, end homophobia and adolescent acne.” Sometimes we are blessed with being able to choose the time, and the arena, and the manner of our revolution, but more usually we must do battle where we are standing." In one scene, Audre's mother hits her for not understanding racism, even though she has done her utmost to prevent her from knowing and understanding it, has made the topic of race taboo. Is she angry with the people who hurt her daughter or frustrated that she can't control the world to protect her? In any case, the punishment doesn't make sense, revealing the divisiveness of white supremacy, the power it has to restrict and shrink love. Phillip's girlfriend. Lorde and Gennie thought she might be a little crazy, as she always sang a tuneless, violent little song as she swept, but as she grew older and wiser, Lorde revised her opinion: "And now I think the goddess was speaking through Ella also, but Ella was too beaten down and anesthetized by Phillip's brutality to believe in her own mouth" (251). Peter

Lorde’s passion for reading began at the New York Public Library’s 135th Street Branch—since relocated and renamed the Countee Cullen Branch—where children’s librarian Augusta Baker read her stories and then taught her how to read, with the help of Lorde's mother.

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Gennie, a.k.a. Genevieve, Audre's closest friend in high school who takes dance classes and commits suicide. The first person she consciously, truly loves.