In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens (26 page)

On a different (possibly irrelevant) level altogether, I was disturbed by the Cuban use of make-up (the first heavily made-up woman I noticed was a curvaceous young soldier in army fatigues who also had her hair in curlers) and have still to resolve my own feelings about, for example, a revolutionary woman who dyes her hair blond—as Haydée Santamaria (who was with the rebels at the Moncada Barracks as well as in the Sierra Maestra) did for several years—or who otherwise (through hair straighteners and whatnot) endeavors to look like someone other than herself.

At first glance, it is actually
cheering
to see that women revolutionaries also paint their faces and process their hair, but then one wonders: if a revolution fails to make one comfortable with what one is (Fidel, one notices, has not tampered with
his
looks or his style of dress, and has, since the revolution began, even ceased to shave), can one assume that, on a personal level, it is a success at all?

On the other hand, it is possible that a revolution frees women who are part of it to do with themselves whatever they like. Presumably, now that everyone can afford make-up, everyone may wear it. This interpretation appeals to me, probably because I sometimes paint
my
face, and I would not like to endure a speech about why I do it. But does this apply to Cuban women who pattern themselves—in dress and make-up—on European models almost exclusively? In a country with such a large black and brown and gold population, this is a question that at some point the revolution might address: can equality be said to be realized if a gorgeous black woman
still
aspires to lighter skin and straight hair, or if a luscious white woman who is brunette longs for blond hair, blue eyes, and a skinny figure? A Cuban film we were shown exemplifies, to me, the danger of perpetuating stereotypic models of beauty. In this film,
The New School,
now being shown in the United States, hundreds of students are on display. It is hard to tell, after the first several frames, that one is looking at youngsters in a Caribbean country: they seem almost entirely Nordic. If this is the image of itself that Cuba is sending out to the rest of the world, one can only wonder what is the true if subconscious
ideal
image Cubans have of themselves. (Fortunately, most Cuban films do not have this problem, and are excellent examples of how a richly multiracial, multicultural society can be reflected unselfconsciously in popular art.)

We all had strict instructions to be, above all, humane in the struggle. Never was a group of armed men more generous to the adversary. From the very first, we took numerous prisoners—eventually nearly 20—and there was one moment when three of our men—Ramiro Valdes, Jose Suarez, and Jesus Montane—managed to enter a barrack and hold nearly 50 soldiers prisoners for a short time. Those soldiers have testified before the court, and all without exception have acknowledged that we treated them with absolute respect, without even offending them by the use of an unpleasant word. Apropos of this, I want to give the prosecutor my heartfelt thanks for one thing in the trial of my comrades: when he made his report he was fair enough to acknowledge as an incontestable fact that we maintained a high spirit of chivalry throughout the struggle

—Fidel Castro,
History Will Absolve Me

I have also been asked about Cuba's political prisoners, none of whom I was privileged to see, though no one that we asked in Cuba denied their existence. I cannot believe, as my gay and lesbian friends fear, that the man who wrote
History Will Absolve Me,
one of the great human-rights documents of our century, orders homosexuals tortured or shot, or that he jails all the people who disagree with his politics. The people's love of Fidel seems genuine and nearly universal. In any case, I cannot, furthermore, take comfort in the fact that the United States tortures and destroys political prisoners, for to do so would be to evade the question of whether imprisonment of politicals is right.

The Cubans seem to feel that the imprisonment of certain people is justified because of their activity against the revolution. They point out also that many of the imprisoned stole food and housing and education from the people, or murdered and terrorized the people under the Batista regime. Since I do not know the facts, I can only recount their presentation of them.

My own bias, when considering a country like Cuba, is to think almost entirely of the gains of the formerly dispossessed. I can be brought to tears by the sight of braces on the teeth of formerly poor children who, through bad diet and no dental care before the revolution, might have been robbed forever of the careless pleasure of smiling. Seeing healthy bodies at play or hearing the intelligent voices of well-educated human beings—whose parents and grandparents languished for centuries in poverty and ignorance—can nearly wipe out my powers of serious scrutiny beyond these facts. To criticize anything at all seems presumptuous, even absurd.

Perhaps it is because Cuba has struggled so persistently to alleviate the burdens of the dispossessed that I believe Cubans will become ever more sensitive to those in their society who are dispossessed now in the revolution: homosexuals, Jehovah's Witnesses, women
as we really are,
political prisoners who are perhaps innocent of everything but “wrong” thought. After all, it is but a short distance from understanding that, just as a life of mere survival is insufficient for the flourishing of the spirit, the spirit is an insufficient support for human life if it lacks a full expression of its
essence.

Finally, I believe in the combination of compassion, intelligence, and work that characterizes the Cuban people. In spite of everything that threatens to make them less than free to be
themselves,
I believe, with them, that they will continue to win.

1977

Here we have watched

a thousand seasons

come and go.

And unmarked graves atangled

in the brush

turn our own legs to trees

vertical forever between earth

and sun.

Here we are not quick to disavow

the pull of field and wood

and stream;

we are not quick to turn

upon our dreams

I
WAS WRITING
about Mississippi, the whole South. Yet, on the morning we left our home there for good I was so tired of it that, at the end of our street, when the car stopped for a final farewell, I could not, would not, look back. I did not expect ever to set foot in Mississippi again.

But it was not Mississippi's fault that I was exhausted by it. I had come there in the first place to “tirelessly observe it,” as I wrote in my journal in 1966. To kill the fear it engendered in my imagination as a place where black life was terrifyingly hard, pitifully cheap. Mississippi had simply continued its evolution into newer versions of itself long after my eyes had begun to close.

I wrote to an old friend who had partially financed my earlier trip to Mississippi that I was going to live there for a while because “the stories are knee-deep.” And it was true. The first two years passed in a fever to get everything down—in poems, stories, the novel I was writing, essays—that I observed. It was a period of constant revelation, when mysteries not understood during my Southern childhood came naked to me to be embraced. I grew to adulthood in Mississippi.

And yet, the cost was not minor. Always a rather moody, periodically depressed person, after two years in Mississippi I became—as I had occasionally been as a young adult—suicidal. I also found motherhood onerous, a threat to my writing. The habits of a lifetime—of easy mobility, of wandering and daydreams—must be, if not abandoned, at least drastically rearranged. And all the while there was the fear that my young husband would not return from one of his trips to visit his clients in the Mississippi backwoods.

It was the last of our seven years in Mississippi that made me wish never to see it again. For in that year the threat of self-destruction plagued me as it never had before. I no longer feared for my husband's safety. In fact, such is American media curiosity, he had become a celebrity to the same extent that he had earlier been “an outside agitator” and a pariah. Since the Jackson school-desegregation cases were his, our daughter and I could watch him at least once or twice a week being interviewed on TV. Nor did I fear any longer for my own safety with or without my husband's company. In the beginning, going to the movies was agony for us. For several years we were the only interracial, married, home-owning couple in Mississippi. Our presence at the ticket booth caused an angry silence. But even this had ceased to be true that last year. More than any other place in this country, the large cities, at least in Mississippi, learned how not to misbehave in public. And the young are everywhere interested in their own pleasures, and those pleasures, in Mississippi, have become less and less attached to the humiliation of other people.

I believe that part of my depression came out of anguish that I was not more violent than I was. For years I fantasized sneaking into various oppressors' houses perhaps disguised as a maid and dropping unplugged hand grenades in their laps. Yet, though I considered these people, who attacked and murdered our children, called us chimpanzees from their judges' benches, and made life a daily ordeal for us, the Hitlers of our time, I did not act out the fantasy. No one else, black, has lived out this fantasy—though I believe this particular one and others like it are rampant among us.

The burden of a nonviolent, pacifist philosophy in a violent, nonpacifist society caused me to feel, almost always, as if I had not done enough.* When I was working well and the poems and stories grew, I had no time to think of this. When the writing went badly, I questioned the value of writing at all. It did not seem equal to the goals of many of the people who came to visit us during that time.

And yet, many of the “revolutionaries” who visited us, mainly to criticize the Mississippi Movement, were clearly absurd. Typical of the scholarly type of revolutionary was the young man from Harvard Law School who, while consuming quantities of cheese and wine at our house, referred to my husband, repeatedly, as “the honky” and even suggested he would start the revolution in our living room, by killing him. It is amazing to me now that we didn't simply throw this young man out, along with the black “militant” woman, also a law student, who came with him, but was rarely allowed to say anything. We were so hospitable and understanding our hearts nearly burst.

Only later in the evening were we repaid for this misdirected behavior. As night crept closer and the darkness stirred our young guests' racial memories—all of them horrible—of Mississippi, the young “revolutionist” became too afraid to venture out of doors alone. His “honky” host was required to call one of his black law partners to escort him back to his hotel through the sleeping city.

I laughed bitterly at this even then. Yet it bothered me. Only now does it seem merely pathetic.

My salvation that last year was a black woman psychiatrist who had also grown up in the South. Though she encouraged me to talk about whether or not I had loved and/or understood my father, I became increasingly aware that I was holding myself responsible for the condition of black people in America. Unable to murder the oppressors, I sat in a book-lined study and wrote about lives that persisted in seeming quite extraordinary to me, whatever their subjects' situations.

In short, I could see that I felt Art was not enough and that my art, in particular, would probably change nothing. And yet I felt it was the privilege of my life to observe and “save” for the future some extraordinary lives.

Many times over the past fifteen years, I have wondered how black people managed to keep going through periods of “benign neglect.” Those periods that comprise most of our history in these United States. With the major Civil Rights battles televised, the most militant of black leaders photographed for the covers of
Newsweek
and
Time,
and my own sense of having come of age at the most visible of all times for black people in America, it had often seemed to me incredible that my parents and their parents and their parents before them had acted out the drama of their lives with none to observe what they did but themselves. I pitied them their obscurity, and could not imagine a period in my lifetime that could be similar to theirs. How naïve I was not to suspect that those hidden lives, generations old, were the constant reality of the race and that they would continue—without benefit of TV or newsprint exposure—to be its great strength. I should have known the truth of a popular saying among people in the black movement who chose not to become its stars and instead remained paranoid about interviews and persistently camera shy: “The revolution, when it comes, will not be televised.”

(The person who had the greatest impact on me, the person I considered the greatest revolutionary, I never saw.)

Writing this now, in New York City, it is impossible not to feel that black people who are poor are lost completely in the American political and economic system, and that black people and white people who are not have been turned to stone. Our moral leaders have been murdered, our children worship power and drugs, our official leadership is frequently a joke, usually merely oppressive. Our chosen and most respected soul singer—part of whose unspoken duty is to remind us who we are—has become a blonde.

Fifteen years of struggle would seem to have returned many of us to the aspirations of the fifties—security, social obliviousness, improbable colors of skin and hair. And yet, there is a reality deeper than what we see, and the consciousness of a people cannot be photographed.

But to some extent, it can be written.

*Whenever I am referred to as an “activist” or, worse, a ‘veteran of the Civil Rights Movement,' I cringe at the inappropriateness. The true activists and veterans—the young people in SNCC (who remain some of the people I have most admired), Mrs. Hudson, Fannie Lou Hamer Mel Leventhal, Dr. King—did things for freedom of which I merely dreamed.