The Relentlessly Upbeat Woman Behind Spirit of Essence : Magazines: Editor Susan Taylor’s personal blend of hope and encouragement attracts 4 million, mostly black readers.

NEW YORK —  Twenty years ago, Susan Taylor had a very big year.

She gave birth to a daughter, ended her marriage and--despite her lack of a college education--snared a part-time job as beauty editor at a new magazine for black women called Essence.

Then on a raw, rainy Sunday, she woke up with a pain in her chest.

It was a pushy, pay-me-some-attention-now pain, one that demanded she leave her baby with her estranged husband and dash to a nearby emergency room. Six hours later, a doctor told her nothing was physically wrong with her.

Walking home up Broadway, Taylor mused about her life. No man. No money--she had $3 in her pocket and was raising her child on her $500-a-month salary. No discernible prospects.

She saw a sign--”Church Service, 3 p.m.” Though it was already 4:30, “a force that was beyond me pulled me in,” she says now. “I sat in the back and (the preacher) said, ‘You can change your life by changing your thinking. You can make anything of your life that you wish and that you’re willing to work for.’ ”

Taylor looks at you.

“Now this wasn’t anything I normally would have been real receptive to. But I felt I had nothing to lose.”

Nothing to lose, Taylor knows, is a place where many good things start. If she’d had more money that day, she figures, she would have taken a taxi. If she hadn’t waited hours in emergency, she wouldn’t have passed the church at the right moment. The pain near her heart, she feels, led her to something vital within.

Some, she knows, will scoff at this. Others will be surprised that any sophisticated professional woman would speak so casually about finding faith. Not Essence’s 4 million readers. They’d think it was only fitting that this pretty, precise woman left that church affirming her life’s pluses. And that, a few weeks later, she was promoted to Essence’s fashion and beauty editor, more than doubling her salary.

They’d know because Taylor--who is now Essence’s editor-in-chief--is a lot like the monthly magazine, whose 20th anniversary issue recently hit the stands. Both radiate a seemingly unquenchable positiveness.

“Susan Taylor? The girl is deep--so positive,” says Washington resident Deborah Best, a C&P; Telephone technician and Essence reader since the early 1970s.

“If I had to use one word for (Essence), I would use positive ,” echoes Johnise Price, 20, a Washington receptionist. “I read Vogue and Mademoiselle for fashion. Essence is where I look to find out who I am as a black person.”

Taylor, seated on a sofa in her sun-colored Manhattan office, looks more than glad to help in the search. This is where she works, chain-sips peppermint tea (“it’s so soothing”) and explains to interviewers her hopes for the magazine and its readers.

She is angry about many things: that black women remain at the bottom of the economic ladder, that so many black children live in poverty, that Essence does not receive its “fair share” of advertising.

Still, she says, she never visualized life giving her quite so much.

“This,” she says, gesturing at a wall dotted with Essence covers--a luminous Vanessa Williams, a hefty but happy Oprah--”is more than I could have hoped or dreamed by myself. I was thinking of doing incredible things, but never thought I’d do anything that would put me in a position to really influence people in the way that Essence does.”

In fact, her influence on the magazine is so palpable that some readers find it hard to separate the magazine--whose logo just happens to be the profile of a woman whose cornrowed hairdo forms a flying banner--from the similarly coiffed Taylor.

“Oh, people say that all the time--’You are Essence,’ ” she says, shrugging. “I’m not; I’m somebody who has a job at Essence.”

OK. But if Taylor’s feisty, you-can-make-it-happen outlook is evident in most of the magazine’s primarily service-oriented articles, it beams from her column, “In the Spirit.” Unlike other editor’s columns, which highlight what’s in the issue, Taylor’s missive serves up an extremely personal blend of hope, challenge and encouragement. And, of course, faith.

“Have (black women) become too sophisticated to believe?,” she wrote in her July, 1981, column, one of her most popular. “One of the most revolutionary things we do is to have faith--to hold a positive vision of what we want for ourselves. . . . Our enemy is fear--fear that keeps us . . . focused on what we do not want instead of focused on devising a plan to lead us out of this quagmire.”

“Susan understands how to talk to her readers intimately--’sister to sister,’ as she’d say,” says former Essence editor Audrey Edwards, now executive editor of Black Enterprise. “That reader is striving to be better. . . . She’s educated, curious and smart. Susan represents all of that herself, strikes that chord of recognition. It’s very powerful.”

Strong words suit Taylor, who wields them herself. This is, she says with a shake of her braids, an extraordinary time to be a black woman. Women of color the world over must continue to empower themselves. We should all affirm the long-denied contributions of African-American men.

Essence is an incredible vehicle, she says, one that connects her to those she most wants to inspire--black women in the United States, and increasingly in the Caribbean and Africa.

Through the years, critics have suggested the magazine could be more aggressive about covering African-Americans’ problems. Others have accused it of being unsupportive of black men (though 30% of Essence’s readership is male and a popular column, Brothers, is written by men).

Few, however, have accused it of not appreciating its primary audience: black women. Brashly, unapologetically, it celebrates them. “Nothing else,” says Edwards, “affirms black women in such a direct way.”

The 216-page 20th anniversary issue pays tribute to more than 100 “sheroes” who’ve made a difference, including Harlem community activist Clara McBride (Mother) Hale, dancer and Alvin Ailey Dance Theater President Judith Jamison, Planned Parenthood President Faye Wattleton, actress Cicely Tyson. Also included: a feature on the resurgence of predominantly black Oakland; a conversation between poet June Jordan and activist-educator Angela Davis, and a celebration of black women’s “dazzling inherited sense

of style.”

A similar spirit moved through the 82-page premiere issue, which hit the newsstands in April, 1970, featuring a pensive model whose Afro filled the cover. The magazine had a guaranteed circulation of 50,000. (Most of today’s 850,000 subscribers and newsstand customers are 18 to 49, well-educated and employed as managers or technicians, according to Essence research.)

Despite the magazine’s expanding reach, challenges remain. Ask Taylor the worst absolutely true thing that could be said about Essence and she doesn’t flinch. “That we haven’t published a list of those corporations that continue to do business in South Africa because it might diminish advertising.” When her publicist tries to put a more positive spin on this, Taylor gently demurs. “No,” she says. “That is the reason.

“We are, like every other media organization, advertising dependent. And there is no black media organization that receives its fair share. . . . Nobody buys more clothes, or more expensive clothes, than (black women) do; nobody wears as many extraordinary fragrances, cosmetics. Yet (black magazines) don’t get the types of advertising that reflect our buying power. That makes us dependent on cigarette advertising, liquor advertising. We should have clothing and floor wax and food. . . . It makes me angry.”

She can be hard on herself as well. Her biggest faux pas as editor? Panicking when an issue featuring then-presidential candidate Jesse Jackson on the cover sold poorly--and deciding to cancel a planned Stevie Wonder cover. “Oh, God--I suffer about that today,” she says. “In little ways, I mess up all the time.”

Still, the woman who in 1970 sashayed into Essence’s offices and told then-editor Ida Lewis that she didn’t need journalism experience to give beauty advice has seldom lacked for ideas--or the chutzpah to see them through. That same year, she impulsively shaved her head in celebration of a beautiful Masai woman whose picture she’d seen. In the late ‘60s, she founded and ran a now-defunct cosmetics company that custom-mixed makeup shades for black women.

The daughter of a Trinidadian father and St. Kitts-born mother, Taylor was an outgoing “wild child” whose adventurous spirit constantly challenged her mother’s Caribbean conservatism. Today, Taylor balances motherhood (Shana is a theater student at New York University), marriage (she wed writer Khephara Burns last year), college (she’s a year away from getting a bachelor’s degree in social sciences from Fordham University) and speaking engagements--all while nurturing a demanding magazine, which--like many 20-year-olds, she says--is “moving toward the truth.”

“It’s unlike editing any other women’s publication,” she explains. “It’s not uncommon for us to get a letter from a sister who’s in real distress, who we think might be losing her grip. We have to stop what we’re doing, pick up the phone, write her a letter, send her a book, make sure she’s all right.”

This balancing act takes a toll--even on the ever-smooth Taylor. “I struggle to be positive,” she says. “It’s my fear about In the Spirit--that people will think I’ve gotten it all together. I’m not there; it’s the road I’m on. It’s what I’m moving toward.”

Sometimes, arriving may not be as important as recognizing the work that needs doing along the way.

“When I look at what we’ve been through . . . (and then) see women operating at the level of an Oprah Winfrey . . . black mayors, a black governor, black women owning and managing every kind of business there is in this country, I can’t help but feel exceedingly proud.”

At the same time, she continues, “I see one-half of black children in poverty, one in every three black people poor, drugs . . . a school system that has failed our children. We have much to celebrate as black people. And we have much to work toward changing.”

The best thing about working for Essence, she says, is her freedom to communicate this struggle and vision, this truth, undiluted. She recalls an acquaintance, a reporter for a major daily newspaper, who wrote a piece about Jesse Jackson and then cried when she read it in the next day’s paper.

“It wasn’t the story she wrote,” Taylor recalls. “It had been edited and changed; (her white editors) just couldn’t deal with her perspective.”

At Essence, Taylor--like each of the other 85 black women on Essence Communications’ 100-person staff--has complete license to address herself.

“We’re putting out a magazine for us,” she says. “And we know what we’re going through.”