Touch and Go (24 page)

How do I get people to say things they keep from others and even from themselves? Simple. It is my ineptitude, my slovenliness. The other, the ordinary person feels not only as good a being as I am; rather he feels somewhat superior. I have not come from
60
Minutes
or
Today
. I have come, a hapless retardee in matters mechanical. I make it clear to the person that now and then I screw things up. I say I can't drive a car. I punch the wrong button. I goof up. The other points out to me: Look, the reel isn't moving, or the cassette seems to be stuck. Of course. At that moment, the other feels needed, by me.

The feeling of being needed may be the most important to any human, and especially to one who is regarded as no more than ordinary. In that way, there is empathy.

 

 

IT'S A FUNNY THING, this particular ambivalence I have toward the tape recorder, and my ineptitude with it, as with all things mechanical. The tape recorder has been my right arm; has enabled me to get the word, and thus the telling detail that otherwise might be forgotten.

It's not simply the use of a tape recorder. I ask the person transcribing to listen carefully and type everything: pauses, horns beeping, clocks ticking, everything. What I want is to capture the full conversation. I want to recreate in my mind exactly what it was like to be with that person, to get as much as possible of what was in that person's mind at that particular moment.

Logorrhea, I think, is one of my interview secrets—the inability to stop talking. However, I do know, way in the back of my head, when I'm saying something irrelevant just to hear the sound of my voice. While I have able assistance from transcribers, and editors, I happen to be a pretty good editor, too. That is, I'm engaged in conversation so much, I'm able to discern what is vamping 'til ready. The editing is key.

I take my questions out as often as I can in order to create something of a soliloquy. What I like is to relate seemingly unrelated things, to illuminate from the unexpected quarter. If it's a whimsical or wry, humorous exchange, or maybe a transition moment that needs a key question to lead someplace else, I leave the question in.
But the question always has to serve a purpose. Why did the person stop talking at a certain moment, or change his or her mind? Why was there a pause?

As you're crafting each individual interview, you keep in mind the span of the entire book. What first comes out of an interview are tons of ore; you have to get that gold dust in your hands. That's just the beginning. Now, how does it become a necklace or a ring or a gold watch? You have to get the form; you have to mold the gold dust. First you're the prospector, now you become the sculptor. Next, you find a gallery, and the book is the gallery. This is shorthand, almost simple-minded, and yet in a sense that's what is involved.

 

 

THIS STORY MIGHT EXPLAIN something about how I work. I have to get into the book whatever I think the book needs, no matter what the obstacle might be, as long as it doesn't hurt anybody. Sometimes I call on people I know, if they happen to fit the bill. Ida was one I called upon, spontaneously.

I was working on the book about the Great Depression, doing a section on Jim, a friend of mine from the Writers' Project. Jim had once upon a time been the editor of a newspaper, well known in his mid-size town in Ohio, but he'd lost his job during the Depression. He's flat broke and leaves his wife and kids at her mother's house and comes to Chicago to find work. No luck. Unemployed, no money to send home, he's staying with a friend. He has nothing. He goes to a social worker and she says, “Where do you stay?”

“With friends.”

“Friends? What sort of friends are they?”

He's already feeling down, he starts to get very emotional. “What sort of friends? Friends! Do you know what the word ‘friend' means?” He's almost crying at the humiliation, but furious as well. So I have a chapter, “Honor and Humiliation,” about him.

But are all social workers this way? I say, no, this is wrong. There
are two kinds of social workers, just as there are two kinds of people. So I ask Ida, the former social worker: “Who of your friends would be good to talk with?”

She starts naming: “Charlotte would be very good.”

“Not quite.” She names a few other people. I look at Ida: “Wait a minute. Didn't you tell me a story once about you and an elderly guy who was a client?”

Ida was very private and absolutely hated publicity. She says, “Oh no, you're not going to do that.”

“I am going to do that. I'll change your name!”
⁴¹

She says, “No, I don't want to.”

“Change your name. I gotta do it. It's gotta be in. Because we've got this other social worker, this bitch, and I want someone good. It has to be you, I'm sorry. I need that incident you told me about.”

So she says, “Well . . .”

I'm sitting on the divan with her, and I've got the mike. Ida tells the story, and as she tells it, her voice has a slight tremor.

So Ida goes to his place and there's this guy . . . now her voice is starting to waver as she tells the story. Meanwhile I'm mumbling, “This is pretty good.”

She's looking at me, not quite glaring, and she goes on . . .

On my tape, there's a pause and you hear her softly suppressing a sob. “He was so humiliated . . .” And then comes the kicker. “. . . and I was, too.” And she lets go.

That's when I jumped up and said, “This is
fantastic
.”

And she sobs, “You bastard.”

I had to get that in the book. She was wiping her eyes and I was chuckling, delighted. “Now, we'll have a drink.”

T
here are so many “ordinary” woman heroes I've encountered on my adventures. Florence Scala, who tried to save the soul of our city. She and Jessie Binford formed an unbreakable bond. They lost the fight to save the Hull House community, yet they won the wondrous respect and admiration of our city's scholars.

There is Marylou Wolff, who said, “If I can learn a truth of power and corruption and how to fight it, anybody can.”

There is Jean Gump, of a middle-class suburb, who headed the Parent Teachers Association and the Council of Catholic Women. She celebrated Good Friday by breaking through the barbed wire along the highway and “damaging” the missile sites. She poured her blood on them, and held up a sign that was seen by millions of car drivers: BEAT YOUR SWORDS INTO PLOWSHARES AND STUDY WAR NO MORE.

And there is Nancy Jefferson, who was raised on a small Tennessee farm. At mealtimes, or in times of trouble, she was taught to ring a bell.

There are such heroes in the most astonishing places. My choice of these four was arbitrary. These four could have been any of hundreds who dream of Canaanland.

“The Feeling Tone” was a phrase used by Lucille Dickerson. It was a tone of Rose Rigsby, a natural-born street poet.

Peggy Terry was the mountain woman of Chicago, who brought together whites and blacks and whose speech was always lyrical.

How can I describe the wondrous gallant lawyer, Pearl Hart? She, defending all those who dissented, challenged corrupt Authority. She was attacked herself, but that never stopped her. Whenever she won, her victory was ours.

 

 

ONE DAY, Florence Scala, still in the fight to save the Hull House community, invited me to visit her friend, Nancy Dickerson.
⁴³

Nancy was an African American hospital aide at a classy North Side hospital. Always, she had a book in her hand, one paperback or another. It might be Langston Hughes, his poetry and his humor. Or William Faulkner's
The Sound and the Fury.
“I carried my books openly. I was always reading. Young white doctors and nurses would look at me eyes wide open, and whisper, “Faulkner?”

“ ‘Yeah, don't you read Faulkner?' I always did this.”

Nancy's feisty sense of independence, despite her many burdens, says all about the human spirit. She was her own breed of sociologist. “I have learned that a Negro woman can do anything she wants to do if she's got enough nerve. So can a white man. But a white woman and a Negro man are slaves until this day.”
⁴⁴

The hope and joy of her life was her grandson, Marvin Jackson.
She fought hard to get him out of their abysmal public school and into St. Ignatius, a highly regarded Catholic school. He continued through Stanford and became a neurologist, despite dispiriting comments from veteran doctors that the field might prove too difficult for him. She died before he became the chief of Washington University Hospital's neurology department. Said Dr. Marvin Jackson, “It was my grandmother who educated me to become the professional I am and to do the work I love.”
⁴⁵

Nancy's words have stayed with me. “Let's face it. What counts is knowledge. And feeling. You see, there is such a thing as a feeling tone. One is friendly and one is hostile. And if you don't have this, baby, you've had it.”

I wish she'd had the chance to meet a different neurologist, Dr. Oliver Sacks, who delighted at seeing those words. The good doctor said: “Goethe spoke of seeing with a feeling eye and feeling with a seeing hand. Henry Head,
⁴⁶
the British neurologist, always looked for something he called “the feeling tone.” I got very excited when I came across Lucille Jefferson's phrase. Nothing is more wonderful or to be celebrated than something that will unlock a person's capacities allowing him to grow and think.”

 

 

DURING THE TUMULTUOUS SIXTIES, there emerged in Chicago a woman of the Ozarks, Peggy Terry. Of the Chicago migrants of that time, she, above all others, fused the “mountain hillbilly,” as she called herself, with the Chicago African American. Especially close was the feeling tone expressed between Peggy and African Americans from small towns. It was she that formed and drum-majored many of the rallies of Chicago's have-nots at the time. She told me, “When I was reading
The Grapes of Wrath
this was just like my life. I was never so proud of poor people before, as I was after I read that book.”

Peggy's father was a Klansman, and she grew up hating black people. She happened to be living in Montgomery, Alabama, during the bus boycott and saw Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. repeatedly beaten at the jail.

After joining the Congress of Racial Equality, Peggy ended up in jail a number of times herself.

There is one moment I shall never forget. Peggy Terry speaking at Operation PUSH, Jesse Jackson's community center in 1968, four years after Martin Luther King Jr. had won the Nobel Peace Prize. Jesse Jackson introduced her. The place was overflowing, the crowd overwhelmingly black.

Peggy spoke very simply about her days on the picket lines. “When I was asked why I, a white woman, deliberately spent time in prison with ‘niggers,' I said, ‘Where else could a non-educated hillbilly shake hands with a Nobel Laureate?' ”

I was present at the event. How could I forget the audience reaction? There was an uproar; there were cheers, laughter, and prayers, all aimed at Peggy Terry. She acknowledged the response, saying: “That's the simple truth. I never felt more important than that moment.”

Peggy was forever growing. One of her recurring refrains was, “There is so much to know that I must find out.” And she did. She appeared in several of my books. Each time there was a new dimension: She had so many arrows to her bow.

 

 

I HAD JUST STARTED WORKING on the first book,
Division Street
. Father Pond, an Episcopalian priest in a white working-class area on Chicago's West Side, told me I had to talk to someone named Rose Rigsby. I said, “Who's Rose Rigsby?”