Caught in Life’s Harsh Extremes
People will do many things--preserve unhappy marriages, remain addicted to alcohol, sink into deep depressions--rather than lose their sense of who they are, even if who they are is miserable. Familiar unhappiness is safe; change involves risk and loss. Thus, a classic psychoanalytic dilemma emerges: How can one expand one’s identity--even in desirable, fulfilling ways--without losing the sense of an essential, rooted self?
This is the dilemma that informs every page of Janet McDonald’s “Project Girl,” though for McDonald, the stakes were more than just psychological. McDonald, one of seven children (“the black, penniless Kennedys”), was raised in a Brooklyn housing project in the late 1950s and ‘60s. Her father was a hard-working postal worker and self-made intellectual, her mother a housewife. But despite her father’s influence, McDonald was keenly aware that her desires for education and achievement were considered traitorous in the “unique subculture” of the projects. Perhaps most important, she came of age at the very moment when that subculture was changing radically--from low-wage to no-wage, from stable nuclear families to wobbly single-parent ones. Guns and hard drugs flooded the projects; staying alive became the definition of success. “[T]he new project look,” McDonald recalls, was “needle-tracked arms, hands swollen like boxing gloves, gray complexions.” Heroin use became “so commonplace . . . that only death seemed too extreme a dose.”
In short, the stakes of McDonald’s painful identity conflicts became astronomically high. To fall was to plunge very far indeed; to escape became a bigger than ever betrayal. McDonald’s ricochetingbetween identities--street girl, family girl, bookish girl, outlaw girl, bourgeois girl--landed her in a top college, and in Harlem buying heroin; in law schools, and in a psychiatric hospital; in a high-paying profession, and in jail. But wherever she alighted, she felt that the real Janet McDonald--whomever that might be--had been left behind. Arriving at Vassar College she noted that, for her fellow students, college was “a means, not the end . . . whereas my dilemma was Shakespearian. While the others were in college to be . . . I had been told to go to college in order not to be: like my mother or my aunt or my father.”
McDonald’s already fragile sense of self--her not-being--is smashed when, in her freshman year at Cornell Law School, she is raped by an older student with a criminal background. It is no exaggeration to say that, after this point, “Project Girl” becomes the chronicle of McDonald’s descent into an essentially psychotic rage. “I likened myself to a Wagnerian Valkyrie, a warrior. I began carrying a knife at all times, kept a club under my mattress, and succeeded in buying a gun. . . . I wanted more than to protect myself--I wanted to kill.” Even her therapists quit on her; as one explained, “ ‘I’m pro-life and you’re pro-death.’ ”
Once again, McDonald found herself in the throes of an irresolvable conflict: Rage began to sustain and destroy her. Even worse, rage ensured that McDonald’s relationship with her tormentor remained her only intimate one. She explains, “He is always your rapist: not a rapist, or the rapist, but yours. He belongs to you, as you belonged to him. And you are forever his victim until that relationship, created through violence, is severed with violence. It’s not like a lover who becomes an ex. . . . The rapist always exists in the present.”
Meanwhile, McDonald continued her series of spectacular successes, and equally spectacular failures, at prestigious schools and jobs. She sought status, money, accomplishment--anything that would make her feel “superior, powerful, important.” Equally fervent, though, was her loyalty to the streets: “I don’t want to be a sellout Madison Avenue nerd. I wanna be in jail without bail from a broken home in Spanish Harlem, a bullet lodged in my side from a gang fight I had years ago, muscular and track-marked, . . . guilt- and conscience-free, . . . a violent jerk. But alive, with a perverse sense of integrity.”
McDonald’s prose is sparse and compelling; her vision is acute, and she avoids self-pity and psychobabble. The story she tells is harrowing, and some readers may get a vicarious, almost prurient thrill from her tale. This would be unfortunate, for McDonald’s purpose is not only to critique the values of the black inner city and the dominant white world, but to contemplate the larger purpose of suffering. Extreme conflict, the author eventually concludes, “is a ‘proving’--something that seeks and, if the heart and mind can bear it, will find the truth of a person, her essence.” McDonald does find that essence, though not in the ways or the places she had expected, or would have chosen.