American writer Grace Paley reads her story, “Traveling,” from her collection, Just As I Thought. Used with the permission of the Paley estate.
Works by Grace Paley
Other Related Books or Materials
The Art and Activism of Grace Paley (link opens a New Yorker article from 2017)
Margalit Fox’s 2007 obituary of Grace Paley (link opens New York Times article)
Grace Paley: the Art of Fiction (link opens a Paris Review interview from 1992)
About the Host
Novelist Randy Boyagoda is a professor of English at the University of Toronto and principal of St. Michael’s College, where he holds the Basilian Chair in Christianity, Arts, and Letters. He is the author of three novels: Original Prin, Beggar's Feast, and Governor of the Northern Province. His fiction has been nominated for the Scotiabank Giller Prize (2006) and IMPAC Dublin Literary Prize (2012), and named a New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice Selection (2012 and 2019) and Globe and Mail Best Book (2018). He contributes essays, reviews, and opinions to publications including the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, First Things, Commonweal, Harper’s, Financial Times (UK), Guardian, New Statesman, Globe and Mail, and National Post, in addition to appearing frequently on CBC Radio. He served as President of PEN Canada from 2015-2017.
Music is by Yuka
From the Archives
Writers Off the Page: 40 Years of TIFA is the first series associated with the Toronto Public Library’s multi-year digital initiative, From the Archives, which presents curated and digitized audio, video and other content from some of Canada’s biggest cultural institutions and organizations.
Thanks to the Toronto International Festival of Authors (TIFA) for allowing TPL access to their archives to feature some of the best-known writers in the world from moments in the past. Thanks as well to Library and Archives Canada for generously allowing TPL access to these archives.
“Traveling” with Grace Paley
OPENING MUSIC SEGMENT (2-3 seconds)
RANDY: Welcome to Writers Off the Page: 40 Year of TIFA, produced by the Toronto Public Library. I'm Randy Boyagoda. Today's episode features the American writer Grace Paley reading a story.
Teaser: GP:The press of travellers had made it impossible for her to move further back. She seemed so tired and I'd been sitting and sitting a day and a half at least not thinking, refusing to think I offered her my seat. She looked at the right and left as well as she could, softly she said, "Oh no." I became fully awake. A white man was standing right beside her, but on the other side of the invisible absolute racial border. Of course, she couldn't accept my seat. Her sleeping child hang mercilessly from her neck. She shifted a little to balance the burden. She whispered to herself "oh I just don't know".
RANDY: Margalit Fox, Margalit Fox, are you out there? Are you listening? I hope so. After all, you were right! When the American short story writer Grace Paley died in 2007, you wrote her obituary for the New York Times. Among the many things you noted about why she was such an original and important figure across the second half of twentieth century writing, and about why her writing invites and rewards close attention, you observed that her “stories, many of which are written in the first person and seem to start in mid-conversation, beg to be read aloud.” Well, have we got a treat for you: a Grace Paley story, read aloud — wait for it — by Grace Paley.
There’s always a particular good that comes of hearing a writer read her own work. She’s alive to its inner dynamism in ways that even the most ardently focused of scholars, critics, and fans can’t be, and this comes across in the delivery, whether as a greater warmth at an otherwise unexpected moment, or a sudden coolness at another. At different frequencies than her readers, the writer hears and knows things about what’s going on, about what’s happening next. You’ll experience as much, in a moment, in listening to Paley read a many-layered story about members of a New York Jewish family making a bus trip to the segregated South, in World War II-era America.
Like Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, and other Jewish American writers of the prior century, Paley — born in 1922 in the Bronx to Ukrainian immigrant parents who came to America in 1906 — decided to write about the lives most immediately around her. In her case, beginning with a collection published in 1959, that meant writing about the situations of lower-middle-class Jewish women of European extraction, now living in and around New York City. They are committed with no-fuss bravery to making the best of things. They often do so the face of economic difficulty and family breakdown, whether the catalysts are world-historical forces or a husband you hoped was a mensch but turns out to be a schmuck. The response a Grace Paley woman makes to the indignities of having to deal with the schmuck side of life is never schmaltz — cheap tears and easy melodrama — but instead a quiet, subtly fierce carrying on with things. In the story you’re about to hear, listen for the word “No,” spoken again and again by a woman on a bus, against a looming mass of ugly power.
I don’t want to say much more than that about the specifics of this story. It’s worth being carried in and across space and time by this one voice, intent on telling us what happened on a bus ride, and how that experience stayed with her, the rest of her life and the lives of others in her family. By the end of the story, you’ll know why Paley is often celebrated and admired by the likes of George Saunders, Susan Sontag and others. It’s for making lasting literature out of the sights and sounds of ordinary Jewish American life; and for the postmodern panache of the reflexivity and games with time and perspective that come through in her work; and for her parallel work as an activist for peace and justice and human rights. The demanding gift of her work generally, and this story in particular, is that it invites you to marvel at the matter-of-factness of how these three components can come together and become something not just moving and surprising, but also marvelous.
This was recorded live at the International Festival of Authors in 1994.
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Traveling by Grace Paley
Grace Paley (GP): My mother and sister were traveling south. The year was 1927. They had begun their journey in New York, they were going to visit my brother, who was studying in the south, Medical College of Virginia. Their bus was an express and had stopped only in Philadelphia Wilmington and now Washington. Here, the darker people who had gotten on in Philadelphia or New York, rose from their seats, put their bags and boxes together and moved to the back of the bus. People who boarded in Washington knew where to seat themselves. My mother had heard that something like this would happen. My sister had heard of it too, they had not lived in it. This re-organization of passengers by colour happened in silence. My mother and sister remained in their seats, which were about three quarters of the way back when everyone was settled the bus driver began to collect tickets.
GP: My sister, saw him coming. She pinched my mother, "ma look," of course my mother saw him too. What frightened my sister was the quietness, the white people in front, the Black people in back. Silent. The driver sighed and said, "you can't sit here, ma’am it's for them" waving over his shoulder at the Negros among whom them we're now sitting. "Move, please". My mother said "No". He said "you don't understand, ma’am, it's against the law you have to move to the front". My mother said "no". When I first tried to write the scene, I imagined my mother, saying... "Oh, that's all right, Mr. We're comfortable. I can't change my seat every minute".
[laughter]
GP: I read this invention to my sister. She said it was nothing like that. My mother did not try to be friendly, or pretend innocence. While my sister trembled in the silence my mother said for the third time, quietly. "No". Somehow finally they were in Richmond, and there was my brother in school, among so many American boys. After hugs and my mother's anxious looks at her young son my sister said "Vic, you know, what mama did?" My brother remembers thinking "What?" "Oh, she wouldn't move?" He had a classmate, a Jewish boy like himself, but from Virginia who had had a public confrontation with a negro man. He had punched that man hard, knocked him down. My brother couldn't believe it. He was stunned he couldn't imagine a Jewish boy wanting to knock anyone down.
GP: He had never wanted to, but he thought looking back that he had been set down to work and study in a nearly foreign place and had to get used to it. Then he told me about the Second World War. When the disgrace of Black soldiers being forced to sit behind white German POWs shook him, shamed him. About 15 years later in 1943 in early summer, I rode that bus for about three days from New York to Miami Beach where my husband in sweaty fatigues along with hundreds of other boys was trudging up and down the streets and beaches to prepare themselves for war. By late afternoon of the second long day we were well into the South. Beyond Richmond maybe South Carolina or Georgia. My excitement about travel in the wide world, was damaged a little by a sudden fear that I might not recognize Jess or he me. We haven't seen each other for two months. I took a photograph out of my pocket. Yes I would know him. I had been sleeping, waking, reading, writing, dozing, waking so many hours.
GP: The movement of the passengers was something like a tide that sometimes seem to ebb and now, seemed to be noisily rising. I opened my eyes to the sound of new people, brushing past my aisle seat and looked up to see a coloured woman holding a large sleeping baby who with the heaviness of sleep his arms so tight around her neck seem to be pulling her head down. I looked around and noticed that I was in the last white row. The press of travelers had made it impossible for her to move further back. She seemed so tired and I'd been sitting and sitting a day and a half at least not thinking, refusing to think I offered her my seat she looked at the right and left as well as she could, softly she said, "Oh no." I became fully awake. A white man was standing right beside her, but on the other side of the invisible absolute racial border. Of course, she couldn't accept my seat. Her sleeping child hang mercilessly from her neck. She shifted a little to balance the burden. She whispered to herself "oh I just don't know."
GP: So I said, "Well at least give me the baby." First she turned barely looking at the man beside her, he made no move, so to my surprise, but obviously out of sheer exhaustion, she disengaged the child from her body and placed him on my lap, he was deep in child sleep he stirred but not enough to bother himself or me. I liked holding him aligning him along my 20 year old young woman shape, I thought ahead to that, holding that breathing together that would happen in my life, if this war, would ever end. I was so comfortable under his nice weight, I closed my eyes for a couple of minutes, but suddenly opened them to look up into the face of a white man talking. In a loud voice he addressed me "lady I wouldn't have touched that thing with a meat hook". I thought "oh this world will end in ice". I could do nothing but look straight into his eyes. I did not look away from him, then I held that little boy tighter kissed his curly head, pressed him even closer so he began to squirm so sleepy, he reshaped himself inside my body. His mother tried to narrow herself away from the dangerous border too frightened at first, to move at all after a couple of minutes, she leaned forward a little placed her hand on the baby's head, held it there until the next stop. I couldn't look up into her mother face.
GP: I write this remembrance more than 50 years later. I look back at that mother and child how young she is, her hand on his head is quite small, and she tries by spreading her fingers wide, to hide him from the white man, but the child I'm holding, his little face as he turns toward me is the brown face of my own grandson, my daughter's boy, the open mouth of the sleeper, the full lips, the thick little body of a child who runs wildly from one end of the yard to the other, leaps from dangerous heights with certain experienced cautions muscling his body, his mind, for coming realities. Of course when my mother and sister returned from Richmond, the family at home, wanted to know, how was Vic doing in school among all those Gentiles? Was the long bus ride hard? Was the anti-semitism really bad or just normal? What happened on the bus? I was probably present at that supper, the attentive listener and total forgetter of information that immediately started to form in. Then last year, my sister casting the net of old age through which recent experience easily slips, brought up that old story. First I was angry. "How come you never told me about your bus ride with mama? I mean really so many years ago, 70 years."
GP: "I don't know," she said, "Anyway you were only about four years old. And besides maybe I did tell you." I asked my brother where we had never talked about that day. He said he thought now it had, had a great effect on him. He had tried unraveling its meaning for years, then life, family, work happened. So I imagine him, a youngster really, a kid from the Bronx, in Virginia in 1927, he was a stranger there himself. In the next couple of weeks we continued to talk about our mother, the way she was principled, adamant and at the same time, so shy. What else could we remember? "Well," I said, "I have a story about those buses too." Then I told it to them. How it happened on just such a journey when I was still quite young that I first knew my grandson. First held him close but could protect him, for only about 20 minutes, 50 years ago.
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RANDY: Grace Paley was born in 1922, in the Bronx, to Jewish parents of Ukrainian background and socialist commitments. Her first languages were Russian and Yiddish, and she began writing in the early post-World War II era, publishing her first collection of stories in 1959. Thereafter, she wrote short stories, taught at colleges and universities including Sarah Lawrence, Columbia, and Syracuse, and protested for peace, civil rights and women’s rights. She was State Laureate in both New York and Vermont, was twice married, and had two children. The 1994 edition of her collected stories was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. Grace Paley died of breast cancer, in 2007.
Writers Off the Page: 40 years of TIFA is a year-long podcast series that celebrates 40 years of the Toronto International Festival of Authors. It's produced by the Toronto Public Library. The Executive Producer is Gregory McCormick. This episode was produced by Gregory McCormick, and me, Randy Boyagoda, with technical support from George Panayotou and Michelle De Marco, marketing support from Tanya Oleksuik, and research support from Marcella van Run.
For more about Writers Off the Page: 40 Years of TIFA, visit writersoffthepage.ca where you will find links to the books mentioned in each episode, and links to other relevant materials in TPL's collections. For all of Toronto Public Library's podcast series, check out tpl.ca/podcasts.
Music is by YUKA.
I'm Randy Boyagoda and we'll be back soon with another episode of Writers Off the Page: 40 Years of TIFA.