Touch and Go (22 page)

The story involves a hooker who's in bad shape and a pimp who's occupying the room she's paid for. He won't let her in unless she throws a twenty-dollar bill over the transom to show that she's earned her keep. The hooker says, “I ain't got it, honey.”

Says the pimp, “When you do it next time and you have enough money you can come in at the door.” In that story she gets sent up for drugs.

“Twenty months and a day,” says the justice, “to keep America strong and mighty.”

She says, “I got out after twenty months and a day, and you know what? The country was still strong and mighty.”

We made a number of documentaries, fifteen or twenty of them. One was very funny, on the unveiling of Picasso's statue in Chicago. Picasso's gift to Chicago was bewildering to the great many people gathering at the plaza. Mayor Daley the elder had made it a point to fill the plaza with citizens. It was jammed. I asked various people their aesthetic opinions of the statue. They merely said, as though with one voice, “If it's good enough for Mayor Daley, it's good enough for me.” That made it official. Mayor Daley had become our arbiter of culture as well.

We did a series entitled
Joy Street
. Later we did digests of some of my books, especially
Hard Times
. We did a documentary called
This Train
about the 1963 March on Washington. Ida was the one who heard about the train going from Chicago to Washington, D.C., and said, “Let's go on that train.”

During the severe snowstorm of 1967, when all the cars were stuck, Ida was the one saying, “Go outside, you gotta go outside!” She was excited because no one could drive and everywhere people were walking and talking to one another. She wanted me to get out there with my tape recorder. I'll never forget how an old lady she met, shortly after the storm, had lifted her spirits. “I fell down in the snow twenty times and I was picked up twenty times and I was offered coffee twenty times . . .” A long pause. “You just can't beat people.” Ida adopted that refrain as her own.

Before the August '63 March on Washington, someone from the NAACP had the idea of sending a train to Washington. Think of Abraham Lincoln, the funeral train from Washington to Springfield, and the meaning of trains in the lives of black people. “This train don't carry no gamblers, this train . . .” Throughout the documentary, that was the theme: This train is bound for glory. Big Bill Broonzy singing sometimes, but other versions as well.

The train has always been the mecca for Deep South sharecroppers, African Americans overwhelmingly. Ever since the “underground railway” of Harriet Tubman, it has had special meaning.

My wife and I took the memorable over-ground train trip to Washington, D.C. Two hundred thousand others joined us at the Lincoln Memorial Pool to hear Martin Luther King Jr. commemorate his dream.

On the train I talked with people off and on throughout the whole trip. Timuel Black, the captain of the train, said the only other time he'd ever felt this exhilarated was when he entered Paris with the Quartermaster Corps (the first American soldiers in Paris after General Leclerc and his troops liberated the city from German occupation).

For a long stretch, I found myself sitting next to the singer and performer Etta Moten Barnett. Etta, then in her sixties, lived to be 103, and was quite beautiful. “What do I think of a train?” she said, and then hummed softly, “This train is bound for glory, this train.” She said, “Even those Jim Crow trains had something special. Little babies running back and forth, their mother so careful to wrap up that fried chicken in certain kind of paper and put it in certain kind of boxes. They came to you offering their boxes with the chicken.” She described the powerful camaraderie that existed within adversity.

We went through Pennsylvania, then Ohio, passing what seemed like miles of empty yards. She said, “Where are the jobs?”

Sitting with us much of that time was a white minister, Howard Schomer. He was head of the United Church of Christ Seminary at the University of Chicago, and eloquent. He said, “Forty acres and a mule was the promise. It's a check that bounced, and now we've come to redeem that check.”

Lawrence Landry, whom I knew, was sort of the co-captain of the train. I sat in the washroom while he spoke of his father the Pullman-car porter, and of what that job had meant. Landry talked about the beginnings of the porters and the union, and the importance of Pullman-car porters in being messengers, spreading the news. The porters would drop the Chicago
Defender
, a newspaper for African Americans, off at the railroad stations. When you were a Pullman-car porter, you'd come to town with that white stripe down your blue pants and walk into the pool hall or the barbershop. “There he is! What's the latest from Chicago?” People would sit and listen to the porter giving them the news.

I wandered up and down the train, and at nighttime if people were only half asleep, even just a little awake, I'd join them. That was an incredible trip, being on that train, being part of something big.

Said one elderly black woman, “I'm not gonna get any good out of it, I'm doing it for my grandchild.”

And a man named Simpson: “My wife and my grandchildren,
they say, ‘Why you going? You can see it on the television.' ” He said, “I don't want to see it, I wants to be
in
it.”

I remember that phrase: “I wants to be in it.” He wanted to be in that moment, he wanted to count, to be a part of history. That was the thing I remember most strongly, the voices of people wanting to make a difference.

 

 

ONE OF THE ASPECTS that amuses me is when certain people complain about my oral history work as “writing with a tape recorder.” They become very indignant indeed. “What sort of writing is that?”

They'd be even more furious were they to know the truth: I'm technologically impaired, wholly undeveloped when it comes to equipment. After all, the typewriter is a machine of communication, like a telephone or a telegraph. The funny thing is, I am as inept with the tape recorder as I am with the automobile, or the bicycle. This is the age of the computer, and I haven't the faintest idea how one works; I've barely mastered the electric typewriter. I can't explain why that is; I imagine it's just the way my brain works. Or doesn't work.

An example of my ineptitude: My work with Jimmy on one particular program based on a long, radio-style prose poem by Norman Corwin. The name “Norman Corwin” has no meaning whatsoever to the young today, which gives you an idea about the gap that exists in our culture. His was the writing that elevated radio scribbling to an art form. Corwin was the best, considered the bard of all radio writers. He produced a series that CBS ran; the most notable program,
On a Note of Triumph
, aired the day Germany surrendered toward the end of World War II. Subsequently, Corwin had written a script, printed in a slim book,
Overkill and Megalove
—his response to Hiroshima, a remarkable piece.

I wanted to do a documentary on it and called him up for permission, and he said “Go ahead.” Jimmy is going to be the engineer
on this. Jimmy is a tall man, and
huge
. At one time he looked just like Steve Allen, but due to glands or appetite, at this point he weighed about 350 pounds, in contrast to a rather short me. So visually, this was a goofy combination, but it was the reverse of the guys in
Of Mice and Men
. In Steinbeck's book, the big dumb guy was Lenny and the little one with the brains was George. In this case, I am Lenny.

Overkill and Megalove
is about the madness of war that leads to the obliteration of the human species. A bomb falls and the two major powers keep fighting until everybody else is dead except for the two leaders. The two guys left in the world say, “Let's sign a peace pact.” I found a Japanese actor to be the voice of one leader, and I did the voice for the other, who is also the narrator.

At the end, the program called for a remarkable sound that was almost impossible to get. As the leaders are talking, the narrator is dying and his speech becomes more and more difficult, until finally, he expires. In the meantime, his number-one enemy, the only other person left on earth, has just died.

I wanted the last sound of the last man on earth.

That's how Corwin has it in his script, but it's a sound that he can't describe. Because of all the technology involved in the war, I figured I had to find a sound that was electrified as well as natural; I wanted a sound that was of this earth and yet something beyond, signifying the emptiness of all beings.

Jimmy has an idea for the sound but he can't do it alone because it involves three turntables. Jimmy knows I'm mechanically hopeless. He's using all ten of his fingers and he's almost got it covered, but he needs just one more element, another digit to start a third tape recorder. It's hardly complicated, just a button or two. This is George talking to Lenny in
Of Mice and Men
.

Finally we're ready to roll. After considerable effort Jimmy's got everything working and he's looking at me and he nods at me and I look at him and I say, “Now?”

Jimmy clutches his hand to his forehead and says, “No, no, let's start again. Didn't I tell you that when I nod my head you press the button?” ( Jimmy demonstrates, nods yes.) “Did I tell you to say ‘now'?”

“No, you didn't.”

“Then why did you say ‘now'?” Jimmy sighs.

“I was silent for a few seconds.”

“You lost two seconds on that, one second, one tenth of a second. It's gone! Now, what do I want you to do?”

“You want me to press the button when you nod your head.”

“OK, you got it now? Don't say ‘now.' Don't . . . say . . .
anything
.”

I say, “I got it.”

“Oh-
kay
,” and he's looking at me. “Here we go!” Jimmy does the same fantastically intricate maneuverings. How he does it I don't know, but he nods at me and I look back and nod, meaning “Now?” I don't say anything. I just nod back, and watch as Jimmy drops the earphones . . . And then he adopts Rodin's
Thinker
pose. By and by he says, “What did I tell you? Not to say anything.”

I say, “Well, it's true I didn't say anything, did I?”

“No, you didn't say anything, it's true. All right, one last try and then I go home, that's it, forget it. One last try. Will you remember to say
nothing
? And don't pause. And do nothing except press the button when I nod my head.”

“I got it.”

“Now repeat it.”

It's Lenny and George, there's no doubt about it. I repeat it. “Good boy.” And so now he does it again and finally I get it right. And the sound was
perfect.
It's a certain kind of sound that we could not have gotten on tape without me pushing that button.

That's an example of how I worked with Jimmy. And how I work with machines. As you can see, I'm not the fastest gun in the West.

By that time, we'd already made the documentary
Born to Live
. Rita Jacobs was the one who suggested we submit a program to the Prix Italia contest. We submitted under the radio documentary category. UNESCO sponsored the contest that year; for the first time, they awarded a special three-thousand-dollar prize. We won that prize.

Rita had come in one day saying, “Here's a wire from Prix Italia inviting you to submit,” and of course, Jimmy volunteered to be my engineer.

Just a week earlier, I'd interviewed a young woman, a
hibakusha
—a survivor of Hiroshima. She had been brought to see me by a Quaker woman whose husband had been on the ship
Golden Rule
, the first vessel ever to try disrupting a nuclear test in protest against the nuclear arms race. The Quaker and the
hibakusha
spoke in Japanese, and we brought an interpreter in to translate. We used that in the beginning of
Born to Live,
which is about life suddenly wiped out.

Dennis Mitchell, the dean of British TV documentaries taught me there's no need for a narrator when you do a documentary, as he showed in his great classic
Morning in the Streets
.
Born to Live
opens cold: the girl speaking Japanese. She says,

And she sang it. Throughout the piece, we had this song, a haunting song.

I had other songs connecting the sequences; one with a social worker I knew, Perry Miranda. He had interviewed a seventeen-year-old kid whose body was covered with tattoos. On his finger was etched D-E-A-T-H. The boy says, “I got that on my hand because we're going to die.”

“Well, don't you believe there's anything,” says Perry, “between the time you're born and the time you die?”

“I guess you're born to die, born to die.”

“How about being born to live?”

It went on to other voices, among them: Miriam Makeba, Jimmy Baldwin, and the Reverend William Sloane Coffin. Finally this old woman says, “Oh, I work all my life and when's it gonna end? And my sweat comes down my neck like a big bouquet . . .” Finally, she says, “But I don't care what it is. Wind's blowing and howling, I'm still outside. The wind got no home. All I know is I'm on my way.” And you hear the voice of Mahalia Jackson singing, “I'm on my way to Canaanland . . .”