The Life She Lived 2 comments

By Caroline Langston

I’ve been carrying it around for nearly two weeks running now, and still it haunts me: an obituary from The New York Times Magazine’s longtime year-end feature The Lives They Lived. Not the classic trope of a hard-copy clipping scissored out of the Sunday magazine’s slick pages, but rather our new reflex of hitting Print and watching the article spit out on one or two smooth, white pages, devoid of all adjacency and context.

That’s what I did during the last minutes I was in the office on the last day I worked before the Christmas vacation: I hit Print. I’d done all I could on a big project, and was just taking a minute before venturing homeward to scan the NYTimes.com page.

Then I saw the headline, “Naomi Sims: Cover Girl, 1948-2009.” I scanned the obit, printed it out, and have been carrying it around in my bookbag since, periodically taking it out to read, and to wonder. And all the time, I keep asking myself, Why?

It’s safe to say that unless you, too, read the obit in the December 27, 2009 edition of the Times, or you are something over 50 years of age, you know nothing about Naomi Sims. But in its brief, bright distillation of Sims’ life, Michael Sokolove’s obituary makes you want to know her.

Who was she? Most simply, she was “the first black model to be featured on the front of a mainstream women’s magazine”—in 1968, well before Beverly Johnson in the 70s and way, way before Naomi Campbell, Tyra Banks, and Alex Wek—and had risen to what Sokolove calls “extraordinary and nearly instant success” as a model while working her way through the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York.

But it’s the story of her life, and the way that Sokolove tells it, that makes this little essay a triumph of the obituary writer’s spare art: She was born in Pittsburgh, the product of a particularly troubled upbringing:

Her mother, separated from Naomi’s father shortly after her birth, gave her up when she was about 10. Naomi spent time in a group home and then was raised as a foster child by a working-class black couple in Pittsburgh’s Homewood section. She would later recall that a younger foster daughter in the house, lighter in skin tone, was treated “like a daughter” while she felt more like a helper. Naomi’s mother lived about a mile away, where she raised Naomi’s two older sisters. (Why her mother gave her up remains unclear.)

How unimaginably miserable that upbringing must have been, I think. Reading those words, I remember Rilke’s observation in his Tenth Duino Elegy, How we squander our hours of pain.

Except that Sims didn’t: With reserves of energy and drive that I can only begin to imagine, she got herself to New York, lived with an older sister, put herself through school, and suddenly found that the bright rooms and beautiful people of the world had all opened themselves to her.

You can perhaps guess where the story might be going—and Sokolove tells it far better than I ever could. Her success faded (she modeled for “just five years,” Sokolove tells us), yet she kept relying on that indomitable gumption to keep herself going: She developed businesses selling wigs and cosmetics for black women, and she wrote a series of books that Sokolove describes as “stuffed with no-nonsense advice directed at black women, giving advice on how to speak (no swear words), how to write a résumé (on heavy bond paper) and how to shake hands (never while seated).”

And this is where I come in: One of those books, How to Be a Top Model, just happened to have appeared on the New Books rack of the Ricks Memorial Library in Yazoo City, Mississippi, when it came out in 1979. Until that December day I read the obituary, I’d forgotten all about the book, whose cover instantly flashed into my mind, and that I’d checked it out and taken it home.

I think about the fact that I saw it, and checked it out. I was eleven years old then, already a bit zaftig in an era when most young girls really were skinny, so I already knew there was no modeling future ahead for me.

I’d just left a troubled, largely black public school system for a white Christian academy down the road (a long story in itself, but mostly having to do with my mother’s bitter turn in feeling on racial reconciliation). I wonder now what I thought about race then, and how blacks and whites related to each other, and whether Sims talked about any of this in her book (This was the one book of hers, in fact, that wasn’t targeted to black women.)

I wish I knew the answers to all these things, but what I do remember were the hours and hours I spent rattling around that old high-ceilinged turn of the century library. I remember the text of How to Be a Top Model offering systematic, encouraging advice on How to Change Your Life, through posture and makeup and exercise and business acumen, of the kind that’s become a cliché in the thirty years since the book came out.

I was a child not much kept up with, and that sense of disenfranchisement may be what I relate to about Sims, when I think about all her hard work, and the loneliness she faced at the end of her life. Sokolove’s obituary tells of how all that success finally fractured, under the weight of a bi-polar diagnosis, divorce, money troubles. She ended her life living in obscurity in Newark, a stranger to her own friends, unwilling to make public details about the mental illness that had encumbered her, ultimately dying of breast cancer at a mere 61.

It is, in part, my own mother’s impending death, I know, that I am mourning here —motherhood and madness and striving being my own clichéd tropes.

But I also mourn the young woman from Pittburgh who somehow got herself to New York, and in her way, opened the world. Of the stuff of life, Sokolove’s obituary has made a resonant eternity.