Bag Lady
Bag Lady
I fell in love with Erykah Badu’s “Bag Lady” in the fall of 2002 at a Columbia University literary reading, where someone had chosen an assortment of neo-soul to accompany the cheese and crackers and wine in plastic cups. It was a Wednesday night, twenty minutes past the stated start time, and nobody was reading yet. We were supposed to be mingling but I didn’t come to these things to be social; the lights were too bright. I came to get out of my apartment and maybe hear an idea, some nugget or way of turning a phrase, that I could bring back home and fold into my own work.
When I heard Badu’s voice, I brought my wine to the window and looked out at another stately building like the one we were in. Even from a foot away I could feel the coolness of the windowpane, refreshing in the overheated room. My hair, reflected in the glass, looked messy. I took a sip of wine and let it lie on my tongue as the background vocals advised me to “pack light”—to let go of anger, resentment, all the emotional junk we drag around.
Had I packed light, coming to New York? I believed I had. I was fresh out of undergrad and starting over, alone again; there were days I didn’t use my vocal cords. But now I could see the beauty in that.
The song’s sinewy guitar sample rose above the small talk. I finished my wine and grabbed another. When I returned to my window a girl from my nonfiction workshop was there, waiting for me, it seemed: the former model who wrote about fashion.
“Oh, hi, Nomi.”
She smiled warmly. “I love how you’re just standing here dancing in the corner of this stuffy-ass reading.”
I felt my cheeks go hot. “No. Was I?”
“There was discernible swaying.”
I grimaced, but she was still smiling. Nomi wrote well-researched pieces about clothes that I found a little boring. She seemed friendly and good-natured—odd for a writer, not to mention a model—but her comments in my margins bordered on cruel: “Why are you so obsessed with this sentence structure?” “This made me laugh, not in a good way.” I liked her.
“I was just marveling at how light this song is,” I said. “The sound of it. Weighed down by nothing, you know?”
Nomi listened for a minute and nodded. “The song makes you feel the way she wishes you’d make yourself feel.”
“Yes!”
She leaned a hip against the window frame. By her own description, in a piece she’d submitted to workshop, she was “Black with a Chinese grandma”; she’d been discovered as a child in a mall while buying back-to-school clothes with her mom, a scene so classically ’80s it would sound made up if it weren’t for her body. Nomi’s body was like the guitar sample in “Bag Lady”: a clean, elegant line that went on and on. I attempted to smooth my hair in the window.
“You hear about those two?” she said, nodding at two poets laughing conspiratorially.
“Yeah.”
“I wasn’t expecting it to be such a meat market here,” she said. “So not what I signed up for.”
“Me neither,” I said forcefully, surprising myself.
“Oh yeah? Why not? You’re young. You got someone?”
“Nope,” I said. “Just, you know. Packing light.”
She clinked her plastic cup against mine. Her fingernails were free of polish but had clearly been groomed and shaped by a professional. Mine were chewed and sprouting hangnails.
My cell phone vibrated in my bag and I reacted swiftly, holding it up to the light to see the name in green-gray pixels: Joe . I answered in a whisper and told him I’d call him back in an hour.
Nomi wore a smug look on her face.
I shook my head and laughed, though it sounded forced, and pressed the end button repeatedly. “No, he’s just my best friend. My songwriting partner, actually.”
She raised her eyebrows.
“I mean, collaborator,” I amended. What was I saying? Words were running out of my mouth.
“That’s cool,” she said, and looked out at our classmates. “Writers are not natural collaborators. Which makes writers’ workshops an odd experiment, don’t you think? Maybe that’s why everyone’s making out. We don’t know how else to help each other.”
I laughed nervously. The song had ended, but I was still thinking about it. “Sometimes I wish writing had more opportunity for collaboration,” I said.
“Not me. The solitude is my favorite part about writing.”
“Actually…”
“What?”
I was thinking that my attempts at collaboration were all tied up with my baggage. Funny Strange had been picked up by a respectable indie label and I’d bought it eagerly at the Virgin Megastore, but its songs came loaded with so many memories, I could hardly listen to it. And my old Ring Finger writings just made me think of Zoe, of the times I’d seen her on campus senior year and the awkward nods we’d exchanged. When the zine went defunct after graduation, I’d packed all my issues into an accordion folder and sent them to Indiana.
“I was just thinking about the Erykah Badu song,” I said. “It could be about being a solo artist, in a way. Shedding that baggage of needing other people.”
“I love that idea. But doesn’t she make it all about finding a guy, in the end?”
I had to confirm this later, finding the song online that night in my sparsely furnished room. Nomi was right. The problem with your baggage, the song seemed to say, is that no man will want you. It wasn’t Erykah’s fault—this was normal for the time, the clear undercurrent of every empowerment message in the mainstream. I found it deeply disappointing even as I related to an awful seed of truth inside it: that all my attempts to grow, to find creative independence and purpose, were at least partly in service of becoming more lovable.
Screw that, I thought, closing my laptop. I was a New Yorker now.