Farewell, Elsie B

The other day I found out I'd lost an old friend. Elsie B. Washington died at the age of 66 of cancer and multiple sclerosis. I hadn't seen her since she moved to Oakland nearly 20 years ago, though I often tried to track her down when I was in the Bay Area visiting the 'rents. None of our mutual friends seemed to know what had happened to her. Turns out she'd been living in Yonkers, just a few miles from my apartment in New York, for a while before she died. Wish I'd known.

Years ago, Elsie and I and a couple of male colleagues used to have lunch once a month at a Japanese place across the street from work and pool our money to buy lottery tickets. It was Elsie's idea and an example of her foremost characteristic—optimism. And sometimes—rarely—we won, usually about $10 a person. The financial stakes and winnings were negligible. The fact that Elsie had selected us to share her luck was the real piece of good fortune for me.

A white woman with a child and a couple of married white men, all of us from expensive private colleges—we might seem to have had little in common with a single black woman from the Bronx. And we didn't. Elsie was by far the most accomplished of us. She was a gifted writer who wrote a couple of nonfiction books, one on sickle-cell anemia, another on relationships between black men and black women. Perhaps most famously, she held the distinction of writing the first black bodice ripper—Entwined Destinies—under the pseudonym Rosalind Welles. She's probably the only one of us who will merit an obit in the Times (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/17/arts/17washington.html).

Growing up in white secular suburban California, I hadn't had a lot of friends like Elsie before. I was quietly (I hope) fascinated by her blackness and her urban, Baptist upbringing.

When I look back, though, it wasn't her accomplishments or her race that made me treasure my friendship with Elsie. It was the example she set of not getting bogged down. I know she faced difficulties in her life, but she just didn't dwell on them. Grueling work assignments, crappy cubicle with migraine-inducing fluorescent lighting, cranky editors, the daily humiliations of being a grunt in a status-conscious company—she seemed to know where these annoyances belonged in the hierarchy of importance: beneath her notice. She had perspective. I think of her as having her eyes on the horizon, not in the sense of ambition but in the sense of taking the long view.

Alas, the long view, in Elsie's case, wasn't long enough. Sixty-six years old.