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divination! But then she went on to describe me in ways that had me sitting there bawling like a baby, because I confronted myself in the description. She talked about the pain I had gone through, particularly as I broke with my husband, and then she identified my Orishas, a male and a female, Ogun the warrior and Yansan, and said that she saw my life extended back in an unbroken line from West Africa.” It was August 1 when Johnnetta got back to New York. When she walked into her office she found not one but several notes, each from a friend who had proposed her name to the newly announced search committee for the Spelman presidency. “And that,” laughed Johnnetta, “is how Spelman College is connected to Brazil.” An unbroken line of meaning that is also an unbroken line of commitment.
    Alice, in her narratives about her evolving interest in management, kept going back to her final months at Harvard Observatory, when she worked on the design of experimental equipment for Skylab. She had declined an invitation to head the engineering group for the project because she was preoccupied with other emotional issues, and watched the project founder even though she was successful in her own technical assignment. “I was just treating the work as a sort of puzzle that I had to get solved, instead of thinking about the significance of the work for other people, so the project never came together. Harvard didn’t fly an experiment on that satellite. They flew empty space. They sent up a lead box instead. That was traumatic for me, even though no one could point a finger at me because I wasn’t in charge.”
    In the spring of my first year at Amherst College, a senior professor and alumnus came up to my husband at a cookout and told him warmly that I was doing “amazingly well” as dean. Even though the comment was intended benevolently, it was a reflection of the constant atmosphere of sexism at Amherst. Still, I took it as friendly and believed there was a real willingness to move beyond it. It is hard now not to see that comment as an omen of an unfolding sequence in which old assumptions were reasserted and habitual bias made me vulnerable. It’s hard to remember the positive atmosphere at the time. So it is that many people only remember the good times with a beloved spouse who has died and only the painful moments in a marriage that has failed. We can often look at a grown-up child and find the threads of continuity, saying he or she was always a politician, a scientist, an artist.
    We also edit the past to make it more intelligible in cultural terms. As memories blur, we supply details from a pool of general knowledge. With every retelling, words that barely fit begin to seem more appropriate as the meaning slips and slides to fit the stereotype. Was my English nanny as perfectly true to form as I remember her, or has the memory been smoothed and normalized? And what about the smoothing that denies the painful parts of happy memories and even makes nightmares more consistent? What about the inappropriate emotions denied and the anomalies that drop out of our storytelling? Even for the recent past and in situations where there would seem to be little motivation for distortion, memories are modified and details supplied to fit cultural expectations.
    Women and men who pioneer new roles have a difficult time, for to the extent that their present defies cultural stereotypes, their past may be elusive, and yet too much forgetting can be a mistake, for any fragment of the past may prove to be important when a changed present makes new demands. When my husband and I were in Iran, I organized a cross-cultural research group on Iranian values, but I had great difficulty finding Iranian women who could play the double role involved, contributing both memory and analysis, social science and introspection. For the men in the group, the challenge of bridging the gap between early experience and training was rewarding; for the