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Turning Points Kate Ellis' memoir of a cross-cultural life Archived article from Sep 23, 2002 By Phyllis Gottlieb It's more than 20 years since that cold December night when Kate Ellis was shot and nearly killed by two black teen-agers as she entered the vestibule of her apartment building on Manhattan's Upper West Side. Although she didn't know it at the time, the shooting would radically change the course of her life, leading in directions she could hardly have imagined during her years growing up in a privileged Toronto family, performing with a modern dance troupe in New York, attending graduate school at Columbia University and teaching English at Rutgers.
In her new book, "Crossing Borders: A Memoir" (University Press of Florida), Ellis, an associate professor of English on the New Brunswick campus, uses her experience as a starting point for exploring in complex and unexpected ways the issues of race, gender and culture. "Something terrible had happened to me, and I knew that I had survived because there was something I wanted to say about that," she says. "And it is how the shooting became a doorway to a richer life. When people have a catastrophic thing happen in their lives, if they embrace it, they can find a world they didn't know was there." But it was more than a decade before Ellis could begin to make sense of her experience, and then it was a trip to Africa and her love for and marriage to Foley, a Nigerian woodcarver, that gave her the elements she needed to formulate her life story as a coherent whole. In searching for a title for her memoir, Ellis came to realize that the idea of borders played an important role in her life. There are, of course, the literal border crossings — Canada to the United States, the United States to Nigeria. But she also finds herself negotiating intangible, but equally real, borders between white and black, wealth and poverty, men and women, health and illness, American culture and African culture, atheism and belief, trust and suspicion, euphoria and sobriety, and, for that one horrifying night, between life and death. While all these themes run through her book, the divisions across racial and cultural lines dominate. The heart of Ellis' book lies in Africa, although she recalls that her decision to take her first trip to that continent in 1993 seemed, at the time, little more than a whim. She was struggling to write a novel based on her life, when a black friend suggested she join a group trip. It seemed an adventure she couldn't pass up, especially at the reasonable price of $1,800, airfare included. "So that was what my first trip to Africa was — a search for writing material and the thing to write about." Shortly after returning to New York, she abandoned the novel in favor of a memoir, and the book that finally took shape moves from Africa to New York to Toronto, from the '90s to the '60s to her childhood during World War II. The juxtapositions are at once jarring and revealing. "The forward motion is really February 1994 to August 1994, but if I came up against something that required going back, then I went back," she explains. "Whenever the road seemed to be blocked, an excursion into the past — to my first meeting with Foley or my mother's funeral — seemed necessary before I could move ahead." The book takes the reader through Ellis' bouts with anorexia, her difficult relations with her parents, her first marriage, her involvement in the '60s protest movement and her volunteer work with inner-city youth, among other events. Throughout her narrative, Ellis never shies away from exploring the difficulties inherent in her experiences, especially when examining her cross-racial, cross-cultural relationship with Foley. Ellis, after all, is white, well-off and highly educated; Foley is black, lives simply and is not really interested in reading. Of necessity, they live apart for some of the year following their own life paths, Ellis teaching at Rutgers, Foley pursuing his art in Africa. But for Ellis, the most striking thing about their union is her discovery of the extent to which Foley's expectations for life differ from her own in ways that strike her as both absurdly limiting and gloriously liberating. On the one hand, in a Nigerian society dominated by family ties, she soon realizes, there are clearly defined, inflexible roles assigned to men and women, the young and the old. So she is not totally surprised, but still somewhat irritated, when during her 1997 wedding ceremony held in her New York apartment, the Nigerian guests insist she cover her face and listen to prayers for fertility, even though she and Foley are unlikely to have children. The ceremony, in the end, turns out to be a multicultural event, although not in the way she had imagined. Yet, at the same time, Foley brings unanticipated joy into her life. "To what could I attribute my sudden serenity?" she asks after their reunion in Nigeria over Christmas break. "And what in Foley's upbringing, so different from mine, produced happiness not just on special occasions when someone or something had made him happy, but as a ground of being?" Ellis knows her marriage will never be an easy one. Her next project is to try to start a Web chat room for American women who have married African men. "It's not an easy thing to do, marrying out of your culture," she concedes. "For African men, whether you're white or you're black, if you're an American, you're not one of them." She is, nevertheless, excited about the surprising direction her life has taken. "It's only when I've crossed a line that the blessings of my life have found me," she concludes.
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