New Passages by Gail Sheehy

Author:Gail Sheehy [Sheehy, Gail]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-76376-1
Publisher: Random House Inc.
Published: 1995-03-14T16:00:00+00:00

When Barbara entered the Howard University School of Divinity in 1988, it was not primarily for the degree but because she wanted to serve the God that had taken her from being a nobody to a somebody. In a worldly sense she is seen today as one of the most influential black Americans of her generation. Pick up a copy of USA Today anywhere in the world, and her unique voice will be prominently displayed on the opinion page. Her bosses love her; they told me so. She is a TV essayist, a writer of controversial books, and a Du Pont visiting scholar at Shenandoah University. But I wondered, having turned 50, could she move beyond surviving to feel worthy of it all?

“I’ve just graduated from the seminary. I can feel myself becoming a minister,” she said fervently. “I also feel I can at some point master the anxiety within me and lose weight; it’s still not too late.” Survival for Barbara, for so many women of color, always meant trying to fit in. Having found that impossible, she has made herself a professional “misfit” whose voice now counts. “Instead of getting angry, now I try to stop and teach,” she said. By mastering her anger and honing her creative skills, she is able to give comfort and inspiration to those as powerless as she once felt.

“I’m very interested in your becoming a preacher,” Lynn Nesbit said to Barbara. “No one talks about religion in New York; it’s a word you can’t mention. You can talk about sex, anything, but if you’re religious”—she affected a look of shock—“people look at you suspiciously.”

The literary agent does not function in a world where people spend a lot of time dwelling on the soul—unless it can be turned into a best-seller. Sitting in her office on Madison Avenue, as I did to interview her a few years ago, one could not imagine her finding time to think about such matters. With her arms tensely latticed around her waist, phones jangling, Lynn was tied up in a foreign auction on yet another big book. But even then she spoke about a new dream for her Flaming Fifties: “If I were to do something else right now, I know exactly what I would do. I’d get a Ph.D. in religious studies.”

After twenty-three years of building a solid reputation at ICM, the huge, all-purpose talent agency, Lynn had a radical change forced on her when the male hierarchy there reorganized the agency and failed to offer her a policy position on the board. This disruption coincided with the departure from home of her two daughters, with whom she had deeply intimate bonds.

“Both events were more disturbing than I acknowledged to myself,” she said. Nesbit joined in a partnership with another successful agent, Morton Janklow, forming what may be the dominant independent literary agency in the country. Even as these unavoidable changes impinged on the youthful illusion that one can control one’s life, they stirred up her spiritual innocence.

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