A Tyranny of Petticoats (40 page)

WE’RE RUNNING. ALL OF US. THE hippies in their dirty clothes. The protesters with handkerchiefs tied around their faces. The marshals with their bullhorns. Everybody’s running.

“Come on!” my boyfriend, Floyd, yells beside me. “The pigs are still after us!”

I pump my legs, grass and gravel pounding through the thin soles of my loafers. I’m gasping for breath. I can’t run any faster than I already am.

“We’ve got to keep moving, Jill!” Diane shouts as she catches up to us. Even in this madness she manages to look down and roll her eyes at where my hand is linked with Floyd’s.

“Yeah, those pigs move faster than you’d think with those stumpy little legs of theirs!” I yell.

Floyd laughs. Behind us, Tom chortles as he pants to keep up.

I glance back over my shoulder. All I see behind my friends is chaos. Everyone’s scrambling to get away from the police, tripping over roots and rocks.

Now that we’ve reached the trees, there are only a handful of officers left in the pack. The rest must have stayed back by the rally at the band shell. There were still plenty of people to club there.

It’s been like this all week. My friends and I drove in from New York on Friday, and ever since, we’ve been running. Thousands of us are in Chicago protesting at the Democratic National Convention — it was the one real chance we might have had to stop the war in Vietnam — but to the police, “protest” means “time to beat people over the head.”

“Look out!” Tom shouts. Diane, Floyd, and I duck just in time. A rock sails over my head.

“What the hell?” Diane yells, looking behind us. A hippie wearing an Indian headband sees us and shrugs.

“Shit, sorry, sister,” the hippie calls. “I was aiming for the pigs.”

“What pigs?” I look ahead to where the hippie is pointing. Two cops are running, dodging through the trees toward a group of boys who look like they might still be in junior high school. The boys are yelling insults at the cops and holding handkerchiefs over their faces.

“Hey!” I shout to the police. “Don’t you have anything better to do than beat up on little kids?”

The officers ignore me, but the boys look my way. The cops see that they’re distracted and move faster, lifting their clubs to strike. The boys turn to run, the police hard on their heels.

I had to open my big mouth.

“Shit,” Floyd says. The boys and the officers run behind a cluster of trees and out of sight. We all slow to a stop except Diane. She takes off for the edge of the trees, her light-brown braid bouncing. For a second I think she’s going after them, but then she trots back toward us.

“The kids got away,” she reports. “The pigs moved on to somebody else.”

“Well, isn’t this just swell.” Floyd drops my hand and runs his fingers through his long blond hair, his eyes sweeping across the crowded park. The officers who were chasing us must have gone off after someone else too. The only police I can see now are walking toward the outskirts of the park or back to the rally site.

Grant Park is huge, sprawling along the shore of Lake Michigan. The band shell where our rally just ended is at the north end of the park, but the cops chased us south, toward the bridges that connect the park to the rest of the city. I wonder how many people are still at the band shell now that the afternoon sun is starting to get low. The protest leaders said we were at least five thousand strong today.

“What the hell was that about?” Floyd says. “I know the pigs don’t need an excuse, but come on, it was a damn
peace
rally.”

“Something happened at the flagpole.” Tom tries to put his arm around Diane’s shoulders, but she shakes him off. “Some dude tried to take down the flag, or burn it, or something, so the bastards came down on all of us.”

“And then they went ape,” Diane says. She’s talking to Tom but looking at me. She’s watched me like an obsessive hawk ever since I took up with Floyd. I knew she would, but I didn’t know how guilty it would make me feel.

“Are they still having the march?” I ask Tom. He’s an officer in Students for a Democratic Society, so he’s plugged in with the marshals who are organizing the protests. “Or did the pigs make them cancel?”

“People are still lining up on Columbus, but they don’t have a permit yet,” Tom says. “They say they’re going all the way to the Amphitheatre to protest the peace plank getting voted down.”

We all look down. We’d been so sure the plank would pass. I didn’t want to believe there are people who don’t want the war to end, but I guess there are, and I guess a lot of them are Democratic delegates.

They’ve been voting all day at the Amphitheatre, five miles south of the park. That’s where the actual convention is happening. The delegates are shuttling back and forth from the Amphitheatre to the glittering hotels lined up on the other side of Michigan Avenue. Hiding in their sky-high penthouse suites, it’s easy for them to pretend we don’t matter. Even though we’re shouting right under their feet.

“Let’s go,” Floyd says. “I’ll show those pigs at the Amphitheatre where they can stick their peace plank.”

Diane rolls her eyes, but Floyd doesn’t see her. She’s never thought much of Floyd. To be honest, neither had I. Not until a few weeks ago.

A group of hippies passes us. One of the men knocks me with his elbow by accident. He turns, sees me, and nods, his lip twitching with surprise. “Sorry about that, sister.”

“It’s all right.” I resist the urge to roll my eyes too. No one calls Diane “sister,” but I’ve gotten it a dozen times a day since we’ve been here. I think it’s because there are hardly any other Negro girls around.

No, not
Negro girls.
I’m supposed to say
black women.
It’s been nearly a year since I left Tennessee, but I’m still getting used to how people talk up north.

I learned most of it from Diane. She’s white, and from Ohio instead of the South, but she showed up on our first day at Barnard College just as green as me. She figured out how to fit in faster, though. Her dorm room was right next to mine on our freshman corridor, and we became best friends the day we moved in. There was something about the warm look in her green eyes that made it impossible not to trust her.

I was so nervous those first few weeks of college. I’d never seen that many white girls in cashmere in all my life. But by our second day there, Diane already knew everyone. She introduced me around, and soon after that she introduced me to the men she’d met at Columbia too.

Later on, as Diane and I spent more time together, there were other introductions. It turned out there were things more startling than a dormitory full of white girls in cashmere.

“Are we really supposed to march all the way to the Amphitheatre, though?” Floyd says as we trudge through the trees. “That’ll take for daggone ever. The convention will be over before we get there.”

“Doesn’t matter,” Diane says. “The pigs will never let us out of the park to begin with.”

“When did you get to be such a negative chick?” Floyd asks her as he loops his arm around my waist. Diane waits until his back is turned, then sticks out her tongue. I glance from side to side to make sure no one saw, even though I can’t help giggling.

Maybe I shouldn’t have linked up with Floyd as quickly as I did. I wouldn’t have done it at all if my father hadn’t decided to visit. He called me on the hall phone three weeks ago and said he hadn’t seen me since Christmas and he wasn’t going to wait any longer. He was driving all the way from Tennessee that very day, in his ancient Dodge with the brake lights taped up and the front bumper sagging. I knew he wouldn’t be happy to see me with a long-haired white man, but that day, all I could think was that he’d never forgive me if he knew I was with a girl. Even with my fancy New York clothes and my natural hair and my white boyfriend, he’d still see me as his baby girl. If he thought I was going against the word of the Lord God Himself, though, that would be another thing altogether.

My father raised me to stay away from the police but to be polite if there was no avoiding them.
“Yes, sir.” “As you say, sir.” “Of course, Officer.”
Daddy grew up in the height of Jim Crow, shuffling along in the street. In the world he knew, only whites walked on the sidewalk. If my father ever saw me running from a blue-helmeted police officer with his club held out to strike, he’d lock me in my old pink-ruffled bedroom until I was ninety.

I close my eyes and give my head a tiny shake. If Daddy knew where I was right now, he’d drive that old Dodge back up north again, charging straight over the curb and into the park. He’d throw open the passenger door, haul me into the car, and tear out of Chicago with the tires squealing.

The sun is fading fast. We’re near Columbus Drive, so we can see the protesters lined up in the street. There have got to be thousands of them there already, filling the street as far as we can see in both directions, but it doesn’t look like anyone’s actually marching. They’re all standing in rows, chanting.

“PEACE NOW!” most of them shout, holding up their fingers in the
V
sign. A new refrain is working its way back from the front of the line too: “DUMP THE HUMP! DUMP THE HUMP!”

The convention delegates are supposed to vote tonight on the Democratic nominee for president. Everyone knows it’s going to be Humphrey. President Johnson has already kept us in Vietnam for four years, but Vice President Humphrey will keep us there another ten if he gets his way. And he will, now that the delegates have voted down the peace plank.

The Democrats had a chance to stop the war today, but they decided to be cowards instead. Now they’re going to nominate a president who thinks peace is the same thing as weakness. We might as well just vote Republican.

I graduated high school last year in a class of fifty. Twenty-six girls and twenty-four boys. Since then, we’ve already lost three of those twenty-four boys to the war.

All three enlisted the first chance they got. Even before the war started, most of the boys in our town went straight into the military out of school; getting a scholarship to a faraway college was nothing but a crazy dream for most of us.

Two of those boys from my class died the first chance they got too.

The third boy simply disappeared. The best his parents can figure, he was taken prisoner. Reverend Taylor still prays with the congregation every Sunday that this will be the week Jesse comes home safe.

I don’t pray anymore. I stopped last spring after I saw a photo in the paper of wounded soldiers being dragged through the jungle. One of them was writhing on the ground in pain. At the edge of the photo, one soldier had his arms raised to the sky. The newspaper said he was signaling for a helicopter to come get the wounded men, but to me it looked like he was shouting at God for leaving them behind. I wanted to shout at God too.

A new chant rises up from the crowd. “HEY, HEY, LBJ! HOW MANY KIDS DID YOU KILL TODAY?”

“Why isn’t anybody moving?” Floyd says.

Tom shrugs. “Still waiting on the march permit, I guess.”

“PEACE NOW!” The shouting from the crowd has changed back. “PEACE NOW! PEACE NOW!”

I nod along with them. There’s something hypnotic about a good protest. Standing with dozens or hundreds or thousands of people who all want the same thing you do. Calling out for it together from the depths of your soul.

“I’m getting in line,” I say. “Who else is coming?”

“I want to go talk to the marshals first,” Tom says. “I can’t believe they’re serious about marching all the way to the Amphitheatre. They’ve lost their damn minds.”

“Okay,” Diane says. “You guys go and we’ll wait here. We can meet up afterward.”

It’s a relief when Floyd unloops his arm from my waist and heads south with Tom. It’s always a relief. At first being with him feels just fine, but then once he’s gone I realize how much better things are without him.

It’s starting to get dark as Diane and I wade into the crowd. She smiles big at me now that the men are gone. I check to make sure no one’s watching us. Then I smile back.

I didn’t even know women could be with women until I got to New York. I was in government class the first time I heard about it. We were having a discussion about feminism and what it meant for society. A bunch of the girls — women — in the class, mostly the ones wearing the cashmere sweaters, were saying feminism would destroy the family as we knew it. Another woman, who had long hair and wore sunglasses even though we were inside, kept saying, “No, no, feminism is the future, man, get it?” One of the women in cashmere — the one with the blondest, curliest hair — said, “So why don’t you go try being one of those radical lesbian feminists, then, if you’re so keen on it?” and the girl with the sunglasses said, “Yeah, I tried out the lesbian trip. I don’t know if it’s for me, but if you’re curious, man, you should definitely give it a go.” Everyone laughed nervously, and the teaching assistant dismissed us early.

That night I asked Diane if she knew what it meant to be a “radical lesbian feminist.” We were smoking and listening to music in my dorm room, lying on the rug, staring up at the stained white ceiling.

Diane had already told me she was a feminist by then. This was our first semester, when the idea of being a feminist still seemed scary. It sounded almost as bad as being a communist.