Chasing Amy

When I first met Amy Futa in the African Arts office on the shabby tenth floor of UCLA's Bunche Hall in the late 1970s, she was working as editorial assistant to Alice McGaughey, the managing editor, and John Povey, the editor-in-chief. I quickly perceived that in the social dynamic of the office, she was playing the role of the doted-upon eldest daughter in what case workers would now describe as a dysfunctional family, albeit one more reminiscent of Charles Addams than Charles Manson.

Dad was played by the truly Falstaffian John Povey. Outsized by any measure, John was blustery and deliciously salacious, with huge appetites for cheap art and bad booze, a cockney working-class boy who made it big in South Africa and then bigger in the thriving real estate markets of Los Angeles and UCLA. Fictive mom Alice was more deeply noir. There was the whiff of the 1940s around her: the smell of Camels and cooking sherry and the Greatest Generation's sense of duty to getting the job done. She arrived on the tenth floor every morning with the rising sun. Her day might begin with ironing (she kept a board in the office, under which she stashed the sherry and damp laundry) or paste-ups. This homey picture of a whacked-out editorial office would be incomplete without the family dog. That role was played by huge and gentle Disraeli, Amy's golden retriever, who galumphed with her up the elevator to the African Arts office every day, where he laid in wait for Povey to bring him biscuits.

Like some latter-day Mine. Defarge, Alice recorded the names of defaulting contributors ("deadbeats") on the office green board, where they awaited some unspecified retribution on a yet-to-be-determined Dies Irae. One must note that while Amy lacks any real vindictiveness, she too maintained Alice's deadbeat list, along with a disdain for mushy writing and sentimental fools. Alice especially despised those sorts of affected fools found in disproportionately large numbers in academe: bloviators, bad photographers, bad writers, poseurs. These were categories which at some point or another many of us--including Povey--slipped into, but never, never Amy.

Though John and Alice doted on her, Amy doesn't really resemble either of them. Certainly not physically, since she has never lost the look of a student at an artsy high school. Nor in volume, since she is not known to declaim opinions on random controversies at the top of her voice. Nor, goodness knows, in consumption of spirits; Amy is a notorious short hitter. Even half a gin and tonic will turn her beet red, and over the years she has shown no improvement in her meager drinking skills. None of these caveats, however, is meant to imply that Amy is without quirks of her own. As she narrates stories of her mother's stroke fund, the amours of her boho sisters, or her son Bart's efforts to bulk up for the police force, Amy sounds more and more like a Nisei cousin of David Sedaris.

And then there is Amy the artist--with words of course, but also with images. Shortly after arriving at UCLA, I remarked on a print in the home of Mike Lofchie, then director of the African Studies Center: the picture of a man being transformed into a fish, an extravaganza of entwined fins, legs, gills, and arms arcing into the quintessential Southern California swimming pool. It was drawn by Amy, who called it Metamophises. "It is incredibly artistic and, I understand, quite rare. We have always felt terribly proud to have one of the copies," Mike told me. "Metamorphises" also proved an apt metaphor for Amy's work as editor. Those of us who've ever published in African Arts know she made us sound far better than we ever deserved (or than she was ever paid for). Amy actually agonized over our articles, with the care of a Flaubert. The distance between crisp, insightful copy and the drudge of arch prose was often measured by Amy's marginal queries and her gentle reminders that "irregardless" and "adamancy" are not English words. The distance was also measured in chocolate. The more dangling modifiers, the higher the candy-wrapper middens rose on her desk.

All of a sudden, at the end of the 1980s, John and Alice were both gone and Amy was on her own. The obituaries she wrote for them are among the finest pieces we've ever published. Talk about les roots justes. For John she pinpointed those loud ties with the generous food stains, bought at the thrift shop. For Alice she picked out the glasses held together with a Band-aid and the "I Love New York" button pinned to her shirtwaist. Most importantly, with Amy as executive editor since 1988, African Arts reblended its editorial family: Greg Cherry took over as art director, and Sylvia Kennedy and Eva Howard as operations managers. The office had transitioned from early All in the Family to late Seinfeld. And whatever nostalgia lingered for the old sherry-and-Camels days, you still had to acknowledge that against all odds, and contrary to many bets, the new team managed to transform African Arts into a better-written and more attractive journal.