Veronica Chambers was a good girl — always got straight A's. Her teachers probably never knew how hard her childhood was.
This is one of her early memories: Seeing her father hit her mother in the head with a hammer. Then she watched as her mother grabbed a towel to staunch the bleeding and walked out the door. Then Veronica started to pray; she prayed her mother wouldn't be so fed up that she'd never come home.
The little girl knew her mother was the responsible one, the parent who paid the rent. And, of course, her mom did come home. And Veronica Chambers grew up to be as hardworking and responsible as her mother.
Recently, Chambers interviewed dozens of hardworking women for a book titled "Having It All: Black Women and Success." Chambers talked to women who had graduated from Smith and from Harvard. She talked to television producers, business owners, college presidents and at-home moms.
"Having it All" is a fascinating book, in part because Chambers knew what questions to ask. She knows the emotional isolation a woman feels when she is the first to go where no one in her family has gone before. The first to go to college and a high-paying job. The first to have the luxury of not working, of being able to devote herself to her babies.
Chambers talked about her new book, "Having it All," and her earlier memoir, "Mama's Girl," during a telephone interview.
In "Mama's Girl," Chambers wrote of her mother's difficulties. But she also accused her mother of being like many other black women who, Chambers says, "raise their daughters and mother their sons." Her mother worried constantly about Veronica's younger brother and never fussed over Veronica, never encouraged her aspirations, didn't seem proud of Veronica, even when she got jobs with Newsweek or the New York Times.
When Chambers became rich, her mother didn't even want to use the Elizabeth Arden gift certificate that Chambers bought her.
Still, "Mama's Girl" makes it clear that Chambers loves her mother and is coming to understand her. The Elizabeth Arden incident taught Chambers that her mother may have fought for civil rights, but she never believed those rights included her. Her mother couldn't imagine walking through the Red Door.
Her father and stepmother seem beyond forgiveness in Chamber's memoir. And during the Deseret News interview, Chambers confirmed that she hasn't spoken to her father in years.
Chambers' brother Malcolm always loved their father best and believed his empty promises. Malcolm was bereft when their parents divorced. He failed in school. He was arrested for drugs.
As for Chambers, she won a scholarship and started college at 16. She had summer internships at Sassy, Seventeen and Essence before being named one of Glamour magazine's "Top Ten College Women" in 1990.
After graduating, she was on a magazine assignment on the set of the movie "Joy Luck Club" when someone introduced her to a literary agent who agreed to read the novel Chambers was writing.
Chambers laughs when she says she was too young to realize how hard it is to get an agent. She laughs again when she recalls how well she took it when the agent told her the novel was awful. Chambers was innocent and optimistic. She figured she'd get better.
She tells her students about this, now that she's 32 and published and a visiting professor at such schools as Princeton. She tells her students, "Even if you start writing at 50, you are going to do 'early writing.' " Better to start young and get it over with.
After reading some of the first-person stories Chambers had written for the teen magazines, her agent told her to write a memoir. Before it was published, Chambers showed the pages to her mother and said, "If you want to change anything, tell me. Our relationship is more important than this book."
The memoir was painful for her mother, Chambers says. But the older woman gave her OK. Chambers said both she and her mother were all right until the book started selling widely. "Then we were both kind of horrified."
After the memoir, Chambers became tired of navel gazing. "I wanted to do a book where I could go out and interview other women." She'd read "Composing a Life" and "Divided Lives" and knew that if it was hard for white women to have it all, the notion must be that much more difficult for black women.
Since she published "Having it All," white women have told her they learned something from the African-Americans Chambers wrote about. Specifically, that it does no good to feel guilty. Since the days of slavery, when they spent more time raising other people's children than they did their own, black women have known how much of life is out of their hands.
Although she's not a mother yet (and Chambers does plan to adopt, she says, since there are African-American babies in need), Chambers continues to learn how much of life is out of her hands.
She was married seven months ago to a man named Jason Clampet. "And quite unexpectedly," she says, "my husband is white."
She'd always dated black men. How ironic that she started dating Clampet just as she was writing the section of "Having it All" that has to do with interracial dating. She never thought she would be marrying outside her race, she says.
She spends half of her professional life doing consciousness-raising; "I didn't want to spend my Christmases and Thanksgivings doing the same thing."
And yet, Chambers went from thinking Clampet would be perfect if he were only black, to realizing that he is perfect. She describes him as generous and funny and also nurturing. It's been a long time since she's been babied.
E-mail: susan@desnews.com