My Life on the Road (6 page)
Read My Life on the Road Online
Authors: Gloria Steinem
Tags: #Biography & Autobiography, #Feminism, #Nonfiction, #Personal Memoir, #Retail
I think I was Leo’s youngest pal. He was in his sixties when he died, and I was fifteen. My father, William Peebles, was his chief pal. I never saw my dad happier than when he was around Leo. I knew I was a lesser pal, but being a pal of Leo’s was the best. He treated everyone equally, he was not pretentious nor condescending. He was kind. And best of all, he was fun. He had lots of stories.
My father gave the appearance of being sophisticated, but he was still a farm boy from Grande Prairie, Alberta. He ran away from home and an abusive father when he was fourteen and spent his formative years on the road.
I think he and Leo, who was a salesman of sorts, liked being out in the world. They shared the awareness that’s only developed by being outside in a strange environment, anytime, day or night. I guess you’d call it street sense. When Dad came into money, he spent it. Leo helped him. He and Leo were constantly scheming to make money. Their mantra was “Never work for anyone else.” It was a game, and life was the playing field.
While my dad was practicing medicine, they would plot between patients and after work. Saturdays I would ostensibly go to work. I would put pills in pillboxes and label them or develop X-rays. Sometimes I got to assist during minor surgeries. When Leo was there, I pretty much hung out with him in a small anteroom to my father’s office, with a private entrance.
Leo was larger than life. He was a big man, over three hundred pounds. We would always start out the same way: I would call him “Mr. Steinem,” and he would look a little pained and say, “Call me Leo.” Not “Uncle Leo” or anything like that, just Leo. It was how I knew we were pals.
When he told me to sit down, he always patted the couch next to him, looking furtively around the room. What was going to happen next was not for just anyone to see. He would start searching around in his suitcoat pockets, eventually coming out with gems. Diamonds, rubies, sapphires. Big ones, little ones. They were not in boxes, no wrappings of any kind. No settings, just loose in his pockets. He loved them. I loved them. We would carefully examine them. We would talk about them. Many times we would just admire them in silence, take our time, we both had lots of time….Invariably, he would reach into another pocket and pull out a roll of money and ask if I needed any. Somehow, I never did.
I never could figure out why he carried all that money and those precious gems on his person. It was all very mysterious and dangerous.
My favorite time was going to lunch across the street at the Radar Room. It was painted black outside, with a single neon sign that you could hardly see during the day but at night was a spectacular green, blinking and spelling
Radar
in both directions. Inside, it was also black, with red leather bar stools and booths and a large mirror behind the bar. We sat in my dad’s favorite booth in the dark. I would always have a cheeseburger, my dad would always have one martini with his lunch, and Leo would eat but never drink.For entertainment, Leo and my dad would get customers to bet that I couldn’t name a particular bone or muscle in the body. This worked better when I was eight, but anytime I was stumped, I would just say, “sternocleidomastoideus.” The customer would look amazed and pay his dime, but I knew I had to know the real answer by the time my father and I went home. Leo didn’t care if I was right or wrong, we were just having fun. He didn’t sweat the small stuff. I wanted to be like Leo.
One sunny morning my father told me that Leo hadn’t been around because he’d been in a serious car accident. We drove down to Orange County, where he was in intensive care. My dad talked to the staff, then we went in to see Leo. He was breathing oxygen through a clear mask, the sheet was around his massive waist, and he didn’t have a shirt on. This was the first time I’d ever seen him without his gray suit. He was breathing heavily, obviously working hard, and sweating profusely. His entire upper body was bruised. Even though he was laboring, he was calm. I imagine he was getting lots of morphine, but he talked to us, and we talked to him. We told him we’d be back in the morning to see him. We’d been told his family was on the way. I wish I could remember all that was said. But I guess it doesn’t matter. The main thing was he knew he wasn’t alone.
Before we got to the car, my dad told me matter-of-factly that Leo wouldn’t make it through the night. I was already planning the return visit. I was irritated he told me. I was already miserable, I didn’t feel like being a good soldier. But I knew he was right. The sunny morning had given me optimism. Now I got a dose of reality. Maybe I was learning street sense.
After Leo died, my father practiced for another year. He got into trouble, went to jail for a while, then retired….I’ve been working for myself for almost thirty years. I’ve become a general surgeon and often times, especially when I see gemstones, I remember my pal, Leo.
I wonder: If you think of someone you love, do you become a little more like them? I would like to think so.
I wrote back to the generous Dr. Peebles—who asked me to call him Larry in my father’s spirit—and thanked him with all my heart. For the first time, I knew that my father had seen two familiar faces in the hospital before he died. When I explained that I had arrived too late—something he hadn’t known—he wrote back to say that, years later, he arrived too late for his own father’s death. He assured me that my father “seemed to be okay with all of it. Like someone who had a good run.”
Each of us knew we were comforting the other.
I
F EVERYONE HAS A
full circle of human qualities to complete, then progress lies in the direction we haven’t been. My father’s clear case of
horreur du domicile
was a fear of home so common, especially among men, that Baudelaire called it “La Grande Maladie.” My father had grown up in an apartment with meals served at the same time and no sound except a ticking clock on the mantelpiece. When psychologist Robert Seidenberg studied women in such changeless homes, he named the result “the trauma of eventlessness.” As a boy, I think my father suffered from this, too. That’s why he pushed his own life’s pendulum to the opposite extreme.
Of course, his quixotic nature played a role, as did his optimism and his gift for excess, yet I doubt he would have chosen such a risky life if he hadn’t been fleeing an orderly one.
My mother was also adventurous by nature. She had rebelled against a mother who thought that creating guilt in her two daughters was the path to their good behavior, and then rebelled against a church so strict that dancing was forbidden. She told me stories of wearing her father’s overalls to play basketball at a time when girls did neither, and learning to drive before anyone else on her block. She then worked her way through university by embroidering for a fancy linen shop and by teaching calculus. On campus, she met my devil-may-care father, the son of an upper-middle-class Jewish family. He made her laugh and was full of dreams—the very opposite of her unforgiving mother, and a father who was often away, working on the railroad. She married my father for his refusal to worry, then was left to worry alone.
Both my mother and my father paid a high price for lives out of balance. Yet at least my father had been able to choose his own journey. He never realized his dreams, but my mother was unable even to pursue hers.
In my heart, I know that if I were forced into an either/or choice between constancy and change, home and the road—between being a
hazar,
a dweller in houses, and an
arab,
a dweller in tents—I, too, would choose the road.
I sometimes wonder if I am crisscrossing my father’s ghostly paths and we are entering the same towns or roadside diners or the black ribbons of highways that gleam in the night rain, as if we were images in a time-lapse photograph.
We are so different, yet so much the same.
COURTESY OF GLORIA STEINEM/RAY BALD
W
ITH SPEAKING PARTNER
F
LORYNCE
K
ENNEDY ON CAMPUS IN THE 1970S.
B
ecause I saw my father as a rootless wanderer, my first solution was to become the opposite. I was sure my peculiar childhood would give way to an adulthood with one job, one home, and one vacation a year. Indeed, I probably longed for that life more than people who had grown up in it. I could have had a sign on my forehead,
HOME WANTED
, but I just assumed a real home would have to wait until I had a husband and children, a destiny I both thought was inevitable and couldn’t imagine. Not even in a movie had I ever seen a wife with a journey of her own. Marriage was always the happy end, not the beginning. It was the 1950s, and I confused growing up with settling down.
It would take two years of living in India, where I went right after college—to avoid my engagement to a good but wrong man—to show me that my father’s isolated way of traveling wasn’t the only one. There was a shared road out there, both ancient and very new.
When I first arrived in New Delhi, I longed for the “memsahib travel” of a car and a driver, something every local official and tourist seemed able to afford. I couldn’t imagine any other way of navigating streets jammed with slow oxcarts, fast motorcycles, yellow and black taxis that looked like bumblebees, swarms of bicyclists, a wandering cow or two, ancient buses stuffed with passengers inside and festooned with freeloaders outside, and peddlers who darted up to sell food and trinkets at every stop.
It would take two months as a rare foreigner living in Miranda House, the women’s college at the University of Delhi, and kindhearted students teaching me how to wear saris and take buses, for me to realize that in a car by myself, I wouldn’t really be in India.
I wouldn’t see women leaning out of bus windows to buy strings of jasmine for their hair, or men and women being endlessly patient with crying babies, or male friends unselfconsciously linking fingers as they talked, or skinny kids in patched and starched school uniforms memorizing by chanting out loud from copybooks. I wouldn’t hear political arguments in the Indian English that bridges fourteen languages, or witness the staggering variety of newspapers that Indians read. Nor would I have known how hard it is for the average Indian just to get to work, or that “Eve teasing,” the sexual harassment and touching that women may suffer in public, was what my college friends traveled in groups to avoid. Certainly I would never have come to share the calm of people in crowds that would have signaled an emergency anywhere else.
I never did ride in one of the tongas pulled by skinny bicyclists. Friends assured me they were an advance over the barefoot runners who had been outlawed in independent India, though some could still be seen in the poorest neighborhoods. Being pulled by another human being just seemed colonial and a mark of shame. This made it especially ironic many years later, when I saw Indian bicycle tongas imported into Manhattan, and pulled by athletic, well-fed young men who charged by the minute.
But even after group travel in New Delhi, it would take one very long trip down the east coast of India to change my homegrown notion that private is always better than public, something American carmakers had preached as gospel.
1
In the way that youth plunges in where age would think twice, I had decided to travel from Calcutta to Kerala on my own, stopping at villages and temples on my way to the oldest part of India at its southern tip. My student friends urged me to take one of the women-only railway cars that were still a feature of trains crisscrossing the subcontinent as a legacy of the British.
When I climbed into that ancient third-class car, I found myself in a dormitory on wheels. Women of different ages and sizes were sitting in groups to talk or nurse babies or share meals from the tiered brass food carriers known as tiffins. As a foreigner in a sari, I soon inspired curiosity, kindness, and a lot of advice, all in our few shared English and Hindi words, plus a lot of gesticulating. Since this was a two-day journey with stops at many small stations, women bargained on my behalf with peddlers who sold hot chai, bright-colored cold drinks, kebabs and chapatis—plus an addictive ice cream known as
kulfi—
all through train windows at every station. In between stops, they offered me their own curries, rice, and homemade breads, taught me more ways to tie a sari than I had imagined possible—including one for playing tennis—and discussed varieties of mangoes with all the nuance that Westerners reserve for wines.
I soon learned there was a very Indian habit of asking personal questions. It must have driven the reticent English crazy. “Why hasn’t your family found you a husband?” “All Americans are rich, so why are you with us in third class?” “Does everyone in America carry a gun?” “If I came to your country, would I be welcome?” And once we got to know each other: “How do American women keep from having too many babies?”
Later I would listen to Indira Gandhi describe her youthful travels in these women-only railway cars as her best preparation for becoming prime minister. She was the daughter of Jawaharlal Nehru, the first prime minister of India, yet she felt she learned more from these women, whose view was personal. They knew that
khadi,
India’s hand-spun, handwoven cloth, was being driven out of business by machine-made cloth from England—even if they didn’t know this was the familiar colonial pattern of taking raw material from a colony, transforming it in England, and selling it back at a profit. They could see why Mahatma Gandhi himself had adopted the spinning wheel as his symbol of Indian independence.
Also, despite the belief of population experts that uneducated women wouldn’t use birth control, these women knew very well when their own bodies were suffering from too many pregnancies and births. That’s why as prime minister, Indira Gandhi took on the controversy of creating the first national family planning program. Her early journeys in those women-only cars had taught her that ordinary women would use it, even if in secret, and literacy had little to do with it.
For myself, I remember not only the learning but the laughing. I was asked to sing an American song—everybody in India seems to sing as part of everyday life—but even they had to admit I wasn’t a singer. They taught me how to squeeze my hands and slip on glass bangles hardly bigger than my wrist, and explained that
cholis,
the tight blouses worn under saris, are the Indian equivalents of bras. They introduced me to fresh lychees, though I’d never seen one out of a can, and warned me about Indian men who would try to marry an American just to get a visa and a job.
Decades later, these women still live in my memory. As their first close-up foreigner, perhaps I still live in theirs. Had I been isolated in a car, this talking circle could never have happened.
After we said our good-byes, I boarded a rickety bus inland, headed to an ashram of Vinoba Bhave, the leader of a land reform movement inspired by Gandhi. He had been assassinated a decade before, but Bhave was still walking from village to village, asking landowners to give a small percentage of their acreage to the landless. I’d written to a former American missionary who was part of this movement, and he had arranged for me to stay in a guesthouse nearby.
But when I got to Bhave’s ashram, almost everyone was gone. An elderly man explained that caste riots had broken out in nearby Ramnad, a large rural area of the southeast, and government leaders in far-off New Delhi had ordered the area cordoned off in the hope of containing the burnings and killings. Not even reporters were allowed in. Nonetheless, teams of three or four from the ashram had walked around the roadblocks and were going from one village to the next, holding meetings, letting people know they were not abandoned, and dispelling rumors that were even worse than reality—an on-the-ground organizing effort to reverse the spiral of violence.
Each team had to include at least one woman. Men couldn’t go into the women’s quarters to invite women to meetings, and if there was no woman present, other women were unlikely to come anyway. But the ashram had no women left.
That’s how I was persuaded that a foreigner in a sari would seem no more out of place than someone from New Delhi, and why I found myself leaving behind all my possessions except a cup, a comb, and the sari I had on, and getting on a rickety bus. As my companion, the elderly man from the ashram, explained to me, if the villagers wanted peace, they would feed and house the peacemakers. If they didn’t want peace, no outsiders could help anyway. As we started on our journey, I noticed that without possessions, I felt oddly free.
After hours on that ancient bus that seemed to stop everywhere, we arrived at the place where police barriers had blocked the dusty road into Ramnad. Without a car or even an oxcart, we just bypassed the road altogether and walked into this large area so traumatized by caste riots.
Thus began a week unlike any other. We walked between villages in the heat of the day, stopping to cool off in shallow streams or find shade in groves where chai and steamed rice cakes called
idlis
were sold from palm-roofed shelters. At night, I watched as villagers slowly came out of their small earthen houses and compounds to sit around a kerosene lamp in circles of six or twenty or fifty. I listened as villagers told stories of burnings and murders, thefts and rapes, with fear and trauma that needed no translation. It was hard to imagine anything that could slow this cycle of violence, yet villagers took comfort from neighbors who had ventured out of their compounds, too. People seemed relieved to see one another, talk, be heard, separate truth from rumor, and discover that any outsiders knew or cared.
To my surprise, these long nights often ended with pledges to keep meeting, to sort out what was true and what was not, and to refuse to be part of vengeful cycles that only endangered them more. Sometimes it was almost dawn before we went home with families who fed us and gave us straw mats or charpoys, wooden frames strung with hemp, to sleep on.
It was the first time I witnessed the ancient and modern magic of groups in which anyone may speak in turn, everyone must listen, and consensus is more important than time. I had no idea that such talking circles had been a common form of governance for most of human history, from the Kwei and San in southern Africa, the ancestors of us all, to the First Nations on my own continent, where layers of such circles turned into the Iroquois Confederacy, the oldest continuous democracy in the world. Talking circles once existed in Europe, too, before floods, famines, and patriarchal rule replaced them with hierarchy, priests, and kings. I didn’t even know, as we sat in Ramnad, that a wave of talking circles and “testifying” was going on in black churches of my own country and igniting the civil rights movement. I certainly didn’t guess that, a decade later, I would see consciousness-raising groups, women’s talking circles, giving birth to the feminist movement. All I knew was that some deep part of me was being nourished and transformed right along with the villagers.
I could see that, because the Gandhians listened, they were listened to. Because they depended on generosity, they created generosity. Because they walked a nonviolent path, they made one seem possible. This was the practical organizing wisdom they taught me:
If you want people to listen to you, you have to listen to them.
If you hope people will change how they live, you have to know how they live.
If you want people to see you, you have to sit down with them eye-to-eye.
I certainly didn’t know that a decade or so after I returned home, on-the-road organizing would begin to take up most of my life.
I
T WOULD BE ALMOST
twenty years before I visited India again. By then, in the late 1970s, the civil rights and anti–Vietnam War movements at home had inspired more change, including among women who loved and were crucial to those movements, yet were rarely equal within them.
2
They realized the need for an independent and inclusive feminist movement that would take on the personal and global politics of gender.
This contagion was going on in many countries. Altogether, a new consciousness was spreading as women met or read about one another, whether in small meetings and underground feminist publications or at global events like the UN Conference on Women in Mexico City in 1975. The dry tinder of inequality was everywhere, just waiting to be set on fire.
Devaki Jain, a Gandhian economist and a friend from my earlier time living in India, invited me back toward the end of the 1970s to talk with some of these new women’s groups. It was as if she and I had been having the same realizations by long-distance telepathy. We could finish each other’s sentences. Inspired by our different paths to a shared place, we had the idea of collecting Gandhian tactics into a pamphlet for women’s movements everywhere. After all, Gandhi’s tactic of satyagraha, or nonviolent resistance, would be well suited to women, and so would his massive marches and consumer boycotts.
As part of our research, we interviewed Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay, a rare woman leader during the independence struggle. She had worked with Gandhi, led his national women’s organization, warned him against agreeing to the partition of India and Pakistan as the price of independence, and then led a renaissance of Indian handicrafts that used the talents of millions of refugees displaced by partition.
As we explained our idea of teaching Gandhian tactics to women’s movements, she listened to us patiently, sitting and rocking on her veranda, sipping tea. When we were finished, she said, “Well, of course, my dears. We taught him everything he knew.”
She made us laugh—and she explained. In India under the British, Gandhi had witnessed a massive women’s movement organizing against suttee, the immolation of widows on their husbands’ funeral pyres, and much more. In England as a young man studying to be a barrister, Gandhi also saw the suffrage movement, and he later urged activists working for self-rule in India to emulate the courage and tactics of the Pankhursts, England’s most famous and radical suffragists. After his return to India from South Africa, where he organized against the discrimination that Indians were subjected to, he was alarmed to find an independence movement with almost no roots in the villages and the daily lives of ordinary people. He began to live like a villager himself, to organize mass marches and consumer boycotts, and to measure success by changes in the lives of the poorest and least powerful: village women.
As Kamaladevi explained kindly, Devaki and I had the Great Man theory of history, and hadn’t known that the tactics we were drawn to were our own. She made us both laugh again—and learn. As Vita Sackville-West wrote:
I worshipped dead men for their strength,
Forgetting I was strong.
W
HEN
I
WENT HOME
after that second India visit, I saw my own past differently.
I had walked in Indian villages in the 1950s, sure that they had no relevance to my own life. But now a women’s revolution was springing from talking circles of our own. At home, I had been going to everything from battered women’s shelters and freestanding women’s clinics to women’s centers on campuses and protests by single mothers trying to survive on welfare. My becoming an itinerant feminist organizer was just a Western version of walking in villages.
