My Life on the Road (23 page)

It’s 1967, and I’m sitting in a diner in rural Virginia, preparing for an interview nearby. Public schools have been ordered to integrate racially, and most white parents have put their kids into newly created, all-white “private” schools that are actually funded with tax dollars by a racist state legislature. My interview is with a sixth-grade white girl who is a prodigy of organizing. She is buzzing around the halls, welcoming black students into this newly desegregated public school. She has her parents’ permission, but this was her idea. If I write about her story, I think she might inspire more students to take the lead, but so far I can’t even get past editors. Newspapers say it’s apolitical “soft news” and women’s magazines say it’s political “hard news.”
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Next to me at the counter are three young white guys who are also talking about school integration or, in their words, “race mixing.” They seem oblivious to the older black waitress who is serving us, and her face is inscrutable. These guys start arguing about Vietnam, and whether black GIs will follow orders from white officers.

“I hope not,” says a solitary older white man sitting down at the counter. “We’re on the wrong side in this war.”

Silence. I wonder if combat will start right here. The older man has interrupted the younger ones, at a minimum, and at a maximum, he’s talking treason. But like Scheherazade, who evaded death by telling irresistible stories, the loner moves his coffee mug toward us and begins to talk:

In World War II, I was in Indochina—that’s what Vietnam was called then—and I didn’t just meet Ho Chi Minh, I knew him. We were fighting the Japanese, and so was he. We were allies. Plus he was our hero because his guerrilla fighters rescued American pilots shot down in the jungle by the Japanese. Ho spent so much time with Americans that sometimes his own men only recognized him by the pack of Camels in his shirt pocket. Also, he loved President Roosevelt for pissing off Churchill by saying that colonialism had to end after the war. Ho even knew our Declaration of Independence by heart—it was his model for sending the French colonists home.

But after FDR died, everything changed. Truman sold Ho Chi Minh down the river by supporting the French—otherwise France wouldn’t join NATO. But didn’t we also fight a revolution to get rid of the British? Didn’t we fight a civil war to keep our country from being split into north and south? Well, that’s what Ho Chi Minh is doing now—and we’re on the wrong side.

There is silence. I can’t tell whether the three young guys think this is truth or treason, but they slap money on the counter and drift away. I go over to talk to this man I now think of as the Prophet of the Diner. He’s the first American I’ve ever heard say what I was told as a student in India long ago: that Ho Chi Minh just wanted independence for his country and would make it a buffer against China—the very opposite of the American belief that Ho’s victory would have a “domino effect” of pushing other Asian countries toward China.

At the risk of sounding around the bend, I explain to the Prophet that I’ve read Ho Chi Minh’s poetry and he doesn’t sound power-mad to me. It’s part of the reason I keep a sign on my bulletin board:

ALIENATION IS WHEN YOUR COUNTRY IS AT WAR

AND YOU WANT THE OTHER SIDE TO WIN.

He laughs and says he himself went to the State Department to remind them that Ho Chi Minh was once an ally—and could be again. Other vets have done the same thing, including a former OSS doctor who treated Ho Chi Minh for malaria. Some have offered to be go-betweens and help bring the United States and Ho together to talk. But as far as the Prophet knows, everyone has been turned down.

When he learns that I’m a writer from New York, he says I should write about Ho Chi Minh, who once lived in and loved New York. It’s a personal note that might humanize him. I promise to try, but I don’t have much hope in the middle of a war.

I do some reading. Sure enough, Ho Chi Minh was once a cabin boy on a French freighter. Historians believe he left this job to stay for a while in Manhattan, Brooklyn, maybe also Boston. That was between 1912 and 1918, a time when Trotsky and many other revolutionaries came here. Though America was the home of racism and capitalism, it also had waged the biggest successful anticolonial revolution. Ho was said to have worked as a pastry chef, maybe a photographer as he later did in Paris, but most of all, he kept writing and agitating for his country’s independence.

By the end of World War I, Ho had become a recognized leader of independence for his country. That made him a criminal in the eyes of the French, who condemned him to death in absentia. He had so many aliases that when he finally became the leader of North Vietnam, the French recognized him in a photo only by his ears. Yet in 1919 he put on a rented suit and a bowler hat, went to the Versailles Peace Conference, and gave President Woodrow Wilson a petition for the independence of Indochina, based on our own Declaration of Independence. There was no reply. After World War II, he delivered yet another petition to President Truman. Still no reply.

For the first issue of
New York
magazine I write an article called “Ho Chi Minh in New York.” Clay Felker, its founding editor, accepts it on shock value alone. After all, Ho Chi Minh is the enemy leader in an ongoing war that is dividing our own country.

In an effort to check facts, I send Ho Chi Minh a telegram. This is surrealism itself. The Western Union operator asks, “Do you have a street address in Hanoi, honey?” Finally, she agrees that “Presidential Palace” is probably enough, “what with the war and all.” I think we both envision this telegram in our FBI files.

I get no answer, but thanks to a kindhearted woman in the French consulate, I confirm that the French freighter on which Ho worked did indeed dock in New York. Despite his different revolutionary aliases, I find a reference to two years he spent living in New York around the time of World War I. I also talk to journalist David Schoenbrun, who interviewed Ho during World War II and heard him speak with knowledge and affection about New York City. Other American journalists who met him later in Hanoi say that he often ended their interviews by asking nostalgically, “Tell me, how is New York?”

I even find his photo in what is said to be Harlem, though the black neighborhood then would have been the Sugar Hill district above 145th Street. There, Marcus Garvey spoke about black pride and anticolonialism, and leaders from Asia, Africa, and Haiti came to listen. So many independence movements were active in the early 1900s that New York tabloids printed fearful articles about the “Yellow Peril” of Asia joining the “Black Peril” of Africa to encircle the globe. The young Ho Chi Minh of those days is described in Jean Lacouture’s classic biography as slender and beardless, wearing a dark suit, a high-collared shirt, and “a small hat perched on top of his head, looking delicate and unsure of himself, a bit lost, a bit battered, like Chaplin at his most affecting.” When I walk past old New York buildings he might have seen, I try to imagine him looking at them, too.

Due to the last-minute chaos and printing problems of the first issue of
New York,
my article is cut by two-thirds. It becomes so concentrated that readers will have to pour water on it.
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Still, I hope the Prophet of the Diner sees it.

Now as I write this almost four decades later, Ho Chi Minh, who owned nothing in his life but a typewriter, remains the only leader ever to defeat the United States in a war. We dropped more bombs on Vietnam than on all of Europe during World War II. About sixty thousand U.S. troops died; twice as many Vietnamese soldiers died; and nearly two million civilians in North and South Vietnam lost their lives. Both here and in a now-independent, unified, and prosperous Vietnam, where tourists travel, there are still broken families, traumatized veterans, chemicals in the soil—and much more. In South Korea when I visited in this new millennium, newspaper headlines were protesting Agent Orange, stored underground by the United States on its way to deforesting North Vietnam. Now it was leaking and poisoning the water table.

According to the wisdom of Indian Country on my own continent, it takes four generations to heal one act of violence. What if Americans had heard the Prophet in the Diner?

In 1978 Father Harvey Egan, pastor of St. Joan of Arc Catholic Church in Minneapolis, invites me to join him on a Sunday morning and give the homily or sermon to his congregation. This isn’t as surrealistic as it sounds. He has invited other laypeople, from union organizers to peace activists, and at least one woman, Maggie Kuhn, founder of the Gray Panthers. He also welcomes gays and lesbians into his congregation, supports peace movements from here to Latin America, and generally behaves in a way that he and many other Catholics believe Jesus had in mind. Though it’s just a coincidence that his church bears the name of a woman who was burned at the stake for being a heretic who wore men’s clothes (not for being a witch, as Hollywood told us), I think Father Egan enjoys inviting someone who’s been regarded as a jeans-wearing heretic, too. He himself prays to God the Mother to make up for centuries of Catholic priests and popes who pray only to God the Father.

Needless to say, Father Egan is not a favorite of the Catholic hierarchy, but he has the biggest Catholic congregation in the state. People want to come home to the church of their childhood without having to leave their adult selves behind. “There are two churches,” as Cesar Chavez, leader of the farmworkers, always said, “one of buildings and one of people.” Father Egan’s church is definitely the people. They love him; it’s his landlord who is the problem.

I’m worried about getting him into even more trouble, since I’m more of a pagan than a monotheist, but pagan just means nature, and Father Egan, too, believes that God is present in all living things. Since most American Catholics live, vote, and act more like the rest of the country than like the Vatican, I figure Father Egan knows what he’s doing. I decide to say yes.

When I arrive on our appointed Sunday, it is clear Minnesota right-wing groups have been working overtime. Cars are circling St. Joan of Arc with huge blow-ups of fetuses mounted on their roofs, and loudspeakers are blasting, “Gloria Steinem is a murderer, Gloria Steinem is a baby killer.”
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There are police to keep demonstrators at the distance required by law, but it is not a peaceful scene. It’s also familiar after being picketed over the years. Repetition can take the surrealism out of anything.

Once inside, Father Egan tells me not to worry, the positive response has been overwhelming. There is a waiting list, even after he doubled the capacity of this large church by holding two masses. The news that I’ll have to speak twice makes me more nervous than the presence of protesters.

As I wait alone in this cavernous space, stage fright hits in a very big way. A pulpit in a Catholic church is nowhere I ever expected to be. My heart thumps, my mouth gets dry, my mind goes blank, and I wish I were anywhere but here. Father Egan finishes introducing me, lifts his arms so his vestments billow out like a butterfly, and says with a mischievous smile, “Glory be to God for Gloria!” The congregation bursts out laughing—and so do I. Suddenly, I feel okay. Laughter is a rescue.

I’m not talking about the Catholic position on abortion. Most people here have their own ideas, and thanks to honest Jesuit historians and to Catholics for a Free Choice (now called Catholics for Choice), they may well know that the Catholic Church not only didn’t oppose abortion but actually regulated it until the mid-nineteenth century. It was made a mortal sin mostly for population reasons.
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Napoleon III wanted more soldiers, and Pope Pius IX wanted all the teaching positions in the French schools—plus the doctrine of papal infallibility—so they traded. Also, Catholicism is hardly alone among patriarchal religions in controlling women’s bodies. Patriarchy evolved as a way of giving men control over women’s bodies and reproduction. It seems more hopeful to talk about what came
before
patriarchy—and could show us a way beyond it.

So I talk about original cultures that saw the presence of god in all living things—including women. Only in the last five hundred to five thousand years—depending on where we live in the world—has godliness been withdrawn from nature, withdrawn from females, and withdrawn from particular races of men, all in order to allow the conquering of nature, females, and certain races of men. Though patriarchal cultures and religions have made hierarchy seem inevitable, humans for 95 percent of history have been more likely to see the circle as our natural paradigm. Indeed, millions still do, from traditional Native Americans here to original cultures around the world. The simple right to reproductive freedom—to sexuality as an expression that is separable from reproduction—is basic to restoring women’s power, the balance between women and men, and a balance between humans and nature. So when Father Egan prays to a female as well as a male god—and invites women as well as men to speak from the church pulpit—he is taking a step toward restoring an original balance.

My homily seems to go over just fine. People nod at the idea that when God is depicted only as a white man, only white men seem godly. They laugh at the idea that priests dressed in skirts try to trump women’s birth-giving power by baptizing with imitation birth fluid, calling us reborn, and going women one better by promising everlasting life. Indeed, elaborate concepts of Heaven and Hell didn’t seem to exist before patriarchy; you just joined your elders or kept being reincarnated until you learned enough. There is the laughter of recognition.

Altogether I sense curiosity and openness, not hostility or opposition.

As people leave, there is a long line to shake hands, to share comments, and to thank—even to bless—Father Egan and me. He asks me to call him Harvey. I think we both feel bonded by this experience of both opposition and support.

Outside, the cars with pictures of fetuses are still circling, and bullhorns are still blaring. Minnesota is home to the Human Life Center, a think tank headed by the delightfully named Father Marx, who often warns that “the white Western world is committing suicide through abortion and contraception.” His use of “white Western” is a big clue to the reasons for preserving patriarchy and controlling reproduction. But still, the parishioners streaming out of St. Joan of Arc don’t seem alarmed. This isn’t their first brush with local extremists. Harvey and I feel we have dodged a bullet.

In New York a few days later, I hear the news that Archbishop John Roach, Harvey’s superior in the Catholic hierarchy, has reprimanded Father Egan and apologized in public for him. This is a big deal. It’s all over the media, from the front pages of newspapers in Minnesota to national television.

The next time I see Harvey is two days later—on a TV screen. He is a disembodied head being interviewed in a Minneapolis studio by
CBS Morning News.
I am sitting in a studio in Washington, D.C. Neither our TV questioners nor the reprimanding archbishop ever quote anything I said, or cite any complaints from parishioners. The controversy is entirely directed at my being invited to give the homily at all.

I’m worried that I’ve endangered Harvey, but when I phone him, he seems to be his usual gentle and unrepentant self. From now on, he explains, he is supposed to invite speakers only from a list of names preapproved by the archdiocese. Later, I read his response to a reporter: “So far, they have found Mickey Mouse, Little Lord Fauntleroy, Peter Rabbit and Lawrence Welk.” I laugh—and stop worrying.

Then a couple of weeks later, I’m in my apartment between travels, sitting peacefully with my cat on my lap, drinking my morning coffee, and I pick up
The New York Times.
Above the fold on the front page, a place usually reserved for wars and presidential elections, there is a headline:

POPE FORBIDS HOMILIES BY LAYPEOPLE

Nothing in my life quite prepares me for feeling directly addressed by the pope. I try to talk myself down—after all, many laypeople have given the homily; maybe I’m just being paranoid—and call a reporter who covers the Vatican. He says that at a minimum, Father Egan and I have provided what is known in the media, and perhaps also in the Vatican, as a news peg.

After that, Harvey is almost always present whenever I visit Minneapolis. He turns up because we really do like each other and I think also because he’s protecting me. Whether it’s a campus lecture or a YWCA benefit or a political rally, there he is, beaming from the sidelines with kindness, friendship, and his trademark enthusiasm. Though the controversy never quite goes away, he isn’t in the least put off by it.

He also works around the pope’s dictate by renaming the homily “a Sunday presentation” and inviting laypeople his congregation admires. He remains public about his support for “women and their participation in the liturgy,” for artificial birth control, for the right of conscience that actually does exist within Catholicism, and for peace and justice movements around the world. Even far from Minnesota, Catholics tell me he provides hope amid the hierarchy.

When Harvey retires in 1986, St. Joan of Arc is still the most popular Catholic church in his and many other states, with a thousand people attending every mass. Father Egan continues to write about everything from the injustice of current wars to the past and future of Catholic mysticism. In the
Catholic Reporter,
he publishes an article titled “Celibacy, a Vague Old Cross on Priestly Backs,” and explains that it started “only in 1139 when the church no longer wanted to be financially responsible for the children of priests.” He opposes the so-called Human Life Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, even though the Catholic bishops advocate it. “Prohibition was a disaster,” Harvey explains, and we shouldn’t be pushing for “another Constitutional amendment based on a moral conviction.”

In 2006, at the age of ninety-one, Harvey’s unique life comes to an end. It’s been twenty-eight years since he invited me to give the homily, yet whenever I’m in Minneapolis I always feel he’s just around the corner. I miss him.

In his honor, I try to be as courageous and outrageous as he was. I add to speeches something I learned from historians of religious architecture but left out of my homily: the design of many patriarchal religious buildings resembles the body of a woman. Think about it: there is an outer and inner entrance (labia majora, labia minora) with a vestibule between (an anatomical as well as architectural term) and a vaginal aisle up the center of the church to the altar (the womb) with two curved (ovarian) structures on either side. The altar or womb is where all-male priests confer everlasting life—and who can prove that they don’t?

This surrealism of patriarchy goes on after Harvey’s death. In 2012 the Vatican announces an investigation—not of the sexual abuse of children by priests that has been exposed as epidemic, but of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious, a group that represents 80 percent of the nuns in North America. They are accused of asking for greater decision-making roles in the church for themselves and for women in general, of “remaining silent” on homosexuality and abortion, of spending too much time working against poverty and injustice, of promoting “radical feminist themes incompatible with the Catholic faith,” and of supporting President Obama’s health care legislation that includes birth control. Indeed, the success of that health care bill seems to have been the last straw. Some members of Congress cited support for the bill by nuns as giving them the courage to vote against the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, which was the major force opposing the bill. The Vatican investigation declared that bishops “are the church’s authentic teachers of faith and morals.” As the Bible says, “Rebellion is as the sin of witchcraft.”

Even I am surprised to find this is so literal. The name of the Vatican body investigating the nuns is the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the same body that conducted the Inquisition, which came to be known as the Holocaust of Women because as many as eight million women healers and leaders of pre-Christian Europe were killed by torture and burning at the stake over more than five hundred years. Chief among their sins was passing on the knowledge of herbs and abortifacients that allowed women to decide whether and when to give birth.

After a period of shock and conferring, the Leadership Conference of Women Religious issues a statement. It condemns “unsubstantiated accusations,” offers to go to the Vatican for a dialogue, and observes that just by following the teachings of Jesus, many in the church might also be called “radical feminists.” Also some of the nuns get their rebellious act together and take it on the road. They begin touring the country to highlight poverty and injustice and become known as the Nuns on the Bus. I start to see men and women of all descriptions wearing T-shirts that say,
WE ARE ALL NUNS NOW
!

If Harvey were alive, he would be wearing one, too.

A
FEW YEARS LATER,
I’m waiting for a friend on a snowbound street in Minneapolis. A skinny boy of twelve or thirteen, with a backpack almost as big as he is, is standing nearby. I realize he’s trying to get up the courage to say something, so I say hello. All in a rush, he says he knows I was at St. Joan of Arc Church, it’s where his family goes, he’s part of a group there called Awakening the Dreamer, and it’s trying to help indigenous tribes save the rain forest. He wants to go to Latin America one day, just like Father Egan did.

I look at this boy who wasn’t born yet when I spoke there—maybe his parents weren’t born yet either—and ask how he knows me or Father Egan. He says he read all about us on the big St. Joan of Arc website. I realize it’s a new day.

It turns out that his family are Hmong refugees from Laos, people who were first displaced by the Vietnam War. Though Minneapolis has been mostly blond and Scandinavian in its immigrant past, it now has become the American city with the largest Hmong population. Indeed, I’ve read that a Hmong woman has just been elected to the city council.

I ask him why he cares about such a long-ago event. He says he’s shy, his parents have a hard time with English, he is trying to help them and also to speak up in school. He read on the church website that I was the most protested speaker Joan of Arc ever had, and he wants to speak up for his family.