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not exist until we find it—both the past and the future are raw material, shaped and reshaped by each individual. Four of us have close to half our adult lives still ahead. None has completed her story. My mother believed that all women, whether they have had busy multiple careers or are reviving old interests after decades as homemakers, have a hidden resource of energy and vitality for their later years. She called it “postmenopausal zest.” Even Joan, who is in her eighties, may still do some of her most important work, because for the first time the significance of that work is being fully acknowledged. When we started work, she described the new book she was writing about wisdom and the senses. Before my book was finished, hers had appeared. Even as I was writing, she and Erik were moving from California to a joint household in Cambridge, and undertaking new kinds of teaching.
    Each of the women whose lives are woven into this book is a woman of stature, but it is impossible to know how far their achievements will stretch in the future. When I started thinking about this project in 1984, I had major tasks to finish before I could begin, a memoir of my parents and my father’s final book to complete, but I immediately started to think about the women I wanted to include. I made my selections one by one, but even as I proceeded, they were moving from strength to strength and becoming more public figures. When I began, Johnnetta was a professor; today she is a college president. There is no way to know what she will be able to contribute from that position to the improvement of education for blacks and women, indeed to the improvement of all American education. The focus of Ellen’s work with the homeless has shifted from research to action, but it is not yet possible to guess how it will inform and shape sustained policy commitments. There is no way to tell whether Alice’s work will become a technological landmark, flourish within a narrow and specific niche, or languish as technological directions change. The relationships and the circumstances of their lives also continue to evolve.
    These are lives in flux, lives still indeterminate and subject to further discontinuities. This very quality protects me from the temptation to interpret them as pilgrimages to some fixed goal, for there is no way to know which fragments of the past will prove to be relevant in the future. Composing a life involves a continual reimagining of the future and reinterpretation of the past to give meaning to the present, remembering best those events that prefigured what followed, forgetting those that proved to have no meaning within the narrative.
    Johnnetta described to me being taken to meet Maruca, a diviner in Sño Paulo, by a Brazilian anthropologist who had just written a doctoral dissertation on divination. Maruca is a woman in the service of the ancient Yoruba gods, the Orishas, brought by slaves from Nigeria.
    “We got to this ordinary house in an ordinary working-class neighborhood. Maruca sat on the end of her bed, and there was a chair for me and a table, where I recognized all the things the Yoruba use for divination: a glass of water, a snake plant, the carved image of a fist to keep away the evil eye, the cowrie shells. Then I looked up at this woman, and she had the most penetrating eyes I had ever seen in my life. She asked my name and then she grabbed the cowries as if to throw them and went into some form of trance, acting as a medium rather than divining. She looked at me and said, ‘You are about to change your job, to do something that is very close to what you now do but it’s different and it’s what very few women do in your country. It’s a job working among our people, a very important job, and you must let the Orishas guide you.’ Well, this was July, and I couldn’t imagine what she was talking about. I’m not looking for a job! I teach anthropology at Hunter College. And I don’t believe in