Just As I Thought (16 page)

“Of Poetry and Women and the World” was spoken at a conference on Writers in Our World, organized by Reginald Gibbons at Northwestern University. The writers disagreed with one another with a certain amount of vehemence, and because we were in the United States continued to talk to one another on this occasion, if not later.

I’ve placed the preface to
A Dream Compels Us
(“El Salvador”) in this section because much of my time in the mid-eighties was used in trying to be helpful to the Central American people in their struggle to free themselves of decades of United States military intervention. This intervention, which in Guatemala began forcefully in 1954, has become quite famous in the last few months—that is, the spring of 1997—as more and more information appears in the press. It is greeted with shamed surprise, but the facts have actually been known for about forty years. During these years about 100,000 Guatemalans died. They were the reasons for our demonstrations and eyewitness visits to those countries.

Demystified Zone

Faith had just returned from Puerto Rico. She had attended a conference on The Bilingual Child and Public Education. She was an active worker in the PTA and had been sent by the local school board.

The neighborhood newspaper, always longing for community news, wanted to interview her. The young reporter made a couple of remarks, then asked a general question: “Mrs. Asbury, I understand you talked with many people and visited schools and clinics as part of the work of this conference. What did you think of Puerto Rico?”

Luckily she had been forming and re-forming some sentences on the plane. She was able to deliver them—awkward but whole. “I think: first, around 1900 we stole their language from the people. The U.S. commissioners decided the Puerto Ricans should be educated in English—just the way the French did with the Vietnamese. Then, around the time the schools and the children were freed finally into their native Spanish, our cities needed new cheap labor, and the people were stolen from their language. That’s what I think.”

“May I quote you?” he asked.

“Yes,” said Faith, feeling like the great traveler. “Quote me.”

In the evening, she persuaded her son Richard to accompany her. They visited her parents, who lived in the Home for the Golden Ages, an institution full of small apartments for the intact and dormitories for those unable to care for themselves. She told her parents that she had been interviewed and would soon be quoted. Her mother went next door immediately to inform a neighbor.

“I hope you didn’t make a fool of yourself,” her father said nervously.

“She handles herself pretty well lately,” said Richard. “Don’t worry, Grandpa. I worry sometimes myself,” he said courteously. His grandfather looked at him and nearly fainted with love. “He looks wonderful, this boy,” he said. “I like his hair long.”

“I do, too,” said Faith’s mother, returning with her friend Mrs. Harrison. “I told her you would be in the paper. She wanted to meet you.”

“Oh, Ma, it’s just a little neighborhood paper.”

“All right, my dream,” her mother said. “You took a trip. You went to a different place. Tell us something.”

“Well, okay,” said Faith. “First, it’s very beautiful. Very green and mountainous and, you know, an island. They call it Daughter of the Sun and Sea. They can grow anything—oranges, bananas, beans, tomatoes, avocados—anything—people have chickens—but you know, I went into a supermarket and
the eggs are all stamped U.S.A.!
”

Mrs. Harrison said, “They’re poor people, I suppose. We send them eggs? It’s wonderful. That’s the good old U.S. of A. for you.”

“Wonderful…” said Richard. “Wonderful? Don’t you people understand anything?”

“What a temper!” said his grandfather, full of admiration. “What Richard means, Mrs. Harrison: We don’t
give
them. We
sell
them. They
got
to buy the eggs. They quit doing all that agriculture themselves.”

“Sure, we even send them rice from California,” said Faith, “—which they could also grow.”

“They should do it if they can,” said Mrs. Harrison. “But the tropics … people get very lackadaisical, I suppose.”

“You suppose,” said Richard. He stood up and looked at the door.

“Calm down,” said Faith. “Let me explain it a little. You know, when I visited one of the junior highs, I went into the kitchen—first of all, I must say the school was beautiful—on a hill, a campus really. In the kitchen I met these women very familiar to me, Puerto Rican women, after all. I know them from the PTA. And it turned out that a few, more than a few, had been in the States, worked in New York, but it was too hard. On Rivington Street, as a matter of fact…”

“Oh! Rivington Street,” said her mother. “Imagine that.”

“You’re supposed to be explaining something,” said Richard.

“I don’t happen to have your machine-gun style, Richard, so just shut up! Where was I? The women. The women were school kitchen aides and they had these enormous bags of rice from California on the table and they were taking all sorts of little bugs and worms out of the rice.”

“You see,” said Richard, who couldn’t be quiet another minute, “you see, they not only squeeze the local people out with the cheap U.S.A. prices but they send them junk. They do that all over. That’s what it means to be a colony, you get junk. You’re poor. You gotta take it. Junky rice, inflammable clothes, you
could
grow oranges but can’t afford it. It comes cheaper from three thousand miles away, even including the oil. You want to know a fact. Little Puerto Rico was our fifth biggest market. A fact.”

“He’s right,” said Faith. “It’s not such a surprising idea—it happens right here. People are poor but they think they’re rich. They own a houseful of plastic and tin.”

“And who needs it?” asked Mrs. Harrison, who still refused to argue. “Garbage! But the President just said they could become a state.”

“A state! What’s so great about becoming a state? They already have the honor of having more dead and wounded guys from the last war, percentagewise. And look at Maine—they’re giving all the shoe business to Korea. Maine’s a colony, Vermont’s a colony. A state! Big deal. Thank you, U.S.A.”

“He does have a wonderful temper,” said Mrs. Harrison.

“
He
was once like that,” said his grandmother, poking her husband in the ribs.

“And what about you? Once upon a time.
I
remember,” he said, smiling. “Once, on the boardwalk, she socked a cop who grabbed our boy for some foolishness.”

This finished everything for Richard. “He was
once
like that. You were
once.
No wonder the world’s in this condition.
Once!
” he shouted, and tore out of the apartment as though
“Once”
were catching, a contagious disease which might afflict his revolutionary limbs forever and set the muscles of his face in an ineradicable smile.

—1980

Some History on Karen Silkwood Drive

“What the hell are we doing here?” asks an old friend, who was young in years not so long ago, when I was only slightly middle-aged. “For Christ’s sake, we cut right through the fences at the Pentagon.” We were in Seabrook, New Hampshire, sitting in a parking lot outside the site of a proposed nuclear plant along with 2,000 other protesters organized by the Clamshell Alliance.

“No! No!” says a young listener, full of the joy of common discipline.

“But look, it’s a goddamn parking lot!”

“Things don’t have to go the same,” I say. I am very tearful. “We don’t have to defend our lives by repeating them. Anyhow, the parking lot is the heart of America. You close down the parking lots and industry is wrecked. A decent car wouldn’t have any place to go. Of course, those bubbling asphalt lots will be hard to occupy in summer.”

The young listener says the simplest true fact. “Look, brother, it took a lot of work to get two thousand people here. If we were only two hundred, we wouldn’t have gotten to this lot. We’d be outside the access road at the Stop & Shop, eating cheeseburgers.”

“Not me,” said a young woman. “I would never eat that stuff.” She is carrying a four-day supply of healthy groceries and offers us her family granola.

I have my own kitchen concoction of grains, fruits, and nuts. “Yours is very good,” I tell her, “but you use more nuts than I do. Try some of mine.”

“How long are you staying here?”

“Well, no longer than Monday morning. We can’t stay any longer,” I apologize.

She puts her kind hand on mine. “Oh, don’t feel bad. You’ve done your best. You can only do your best.”

I know what my best is, and I have to admit to her that this is my second best. But: “How long are you staying, honey?”

“Oh,” she says, “a week, anything, as long as I can.”

“What if we’re all arrested tomorrow morning?”

“Well, as soon as we get out, we’ll return, we really will. Our affinity group is solidly committed to return.”

Within the comfort of our affinity group, we place our sleeping bags on oak leaves over the sand and stone. We have named our street Karen Silkwood Drive, and our new tent city is called Seabrook. It’s quite beautiful—the American-Russian moon shines on the green, blue, yellow, orange plastic and nylon tents.

Late in the morning (9 a.m.) my husband goes off to listen to the almost continuous parliament of spokespersons sent from each affinity group to bring views and initiatives to the Decision Making Body—the DMB. A new democratic process is being created.

“They never stop talking,” someone says.

“Everyone has something to say,” someone answers.

I decide to attend a Friends meeting on the northeast corner near the helicopter gate, the National Guardsmen, and now and then the dogs. We sit on the stony landfill, the dust blowing. I say to myself, Why, this must be just what Quang Tri looked like—the bulldozed, flattened, “pacified” countryside. I can’t help those connections. They stand up among the thoughts in my head, again and again.

Anyway, I’m not very good at Friends meetings. My mind refuses to prevent my eyes from looking at the folks around me, and I’m often annoyed because I can’t get the drift of the murmur of private witness. I did hear one young man near me say, “May Your intercession here today be the fruit of our action.” I think this means “God helps those that help themselves,” a proverb that sounds meaner than it is.

Finally a woman as gray as I am spoke up loud and clear. She intended to be heard. She told about the Westover Army Base witness during the Vietnam War. She had met a soldier later, she said, who told her it was the persistence and sagacity of the Quaker witness at Westover that had helped those draftees understand the war and turn in action against it.

The arrests begin at 3:30 and continue for thirteen hours. People are moved in buses and trucks. There is lots of time for argument—no, discussion—to go limp, to go rigid. In the end, many give up the luxury of individual torture for the security of arrest by affinity. So we are picked up and dumped into an army truck at 7:30. Twenty-seven of us remain sitting or organized into sardines, we sleep on the floor until morning. One of our clan stands talking to the state troopers and Guardsmen, some of whom haven’t slept for forty-six hours. He talks and listens all night long, about the war, about Phu Bai, where he was stationed, about the Navy, the Marines, horses, actions, guard duty, guns. A man’s life, I think. I had forgotten the old interests and disgusts.

In the morning, Steve, the Clamshell staff man, who is twenty years old, types out our first news release. He tapes it to a Frisbee, and David, his brother Clam, with a great swing flips it out over the army snow fence into the hands of the UPI photographer. The National Guardsmen watch, then bring us Cokes and orange soda.

I write this on the sixth day. Fourteen hundred people have remained in bail solidarity inside the detention centers of New Hampshire. There is no peaceful atom, and in our time war has been declared across the years against the future, which was once the holding place for hope.

One more story:

In another time, my friend and I vigiled every Saturday afternoon for eight years on Eighth Street in Manhattan. We offered information and support for resistance to war—legal and illegal, civilian and military. We were mostly mothers and fathers. The faces on our posters were American and Vietnamese. On our square in the middle of traffic, we were attacked for years with spit, curses, and scary driving tactics. Then, in the last two years, to our surprise people began to shout, “Right on! Stick with it!”

One day an old lady stopped me as I was giving out leaflets. I loved her at once, because she reminded me of my own mother and several aunts, who seemed in their construction to have only good posture to offer in the fight against gravity.

“They’re wonderful boys,” she said.

“Oh yes,” I said.

“We have to do everything we can for them,” she said.

“We do,” I said.

“Because what’s going on, what they’re trying to do to them, is terrible, especially to the Vietnamese people, how they suffer, without end,” she said.

“Yes,” I said.

“So you have to keep it up, the support. The boys sit in jail, I know what it’s like. They don’t want to kill people, they give up everything, they’re brave, they’re the hope.”

I remembered my job. “Can you join us? To stand with our big sign over there, or give out leaflets in case you hate to stand?”

“No, no, I can’t do it right now. Sometime maybe.”

“Could you give me your name? We’re a local group.”

“Yes, certainly,” she said. “My name is Sobell, I’m Morton Sobell’s mother.”

I said, “Oh, Morton Sobell. Oh…”

Then, without a thought, we fell into each other’s arms and began to cry, because her son was still at that time hopelessly in jail and had been there for years, all through his young manhood. And the sons and daughters of my friends were caught in a time of war that would use them painfully, no matter what their decisions.